this nature; visits, as we should now term them, because it was
customary for the callers to bring their nighties--or would have been
if the callers had had any. The Dark Ages, curiously enough, lacked this
garment of the dark. But it was only after the Feudal Period that the
call, as we now know and practise it, became a social custom; and even
to this day feudalism, in an attenuated form, rules society, and the
call is often enough an act of homage to the superior social chief. One
might argue (except for the fact that Sheba _gave_ as well as exhibited
her treasurer to Solomon) that Mrs. Jones is but following historic
precedent when she brings and exhibits Mr. Jones to Mrs. Smith. Or,
again, it might be pointed out that both Cleopatra and Sheba _brought
their slaves_. There is, apparently, more than one sequence (as Mr.
Spencer would say), but there is also a wide divergence from original
type. Only partly and occasionally an act of homage, the call has
become, broadly speaking, a recognition of exact social equality, as if
the round, dignified American cheese in Grocer Brown's ice-box should
receive and return a call from the round, dignified American cheese in
Grocer Green's ice-box.
And it has become divisible into as many varieties as Mr. Heinz's
pickles.--The _call friendly_ ('Let us go and call on the Smiths: I'd
like to see them'); the _call compulsory_ ('We really _must_ make that
call on the Smiths'); the _call curious_ ('I wonder if it's so, what I
heard yesterday about the Smiths'); the _call convenient_ ('As we
haven't anything better to do this evening, we might call on the
Smiths'); the _call proud_ ('Suppose we get out the new motor, and run
round to the Smiths'); and so forth, and so forth. But, however we look
at it, the call is dependent upon feminine initiative. Our mature
married gentleman, unless he has had already a call to the ministry, has
no call, socially speaking, to make calls. It is his wife's business. As
British soldiers have grimly sung on their way to battle, 'He's there
because he's there, because he's there, because he's there.' But it is
his plain duty to _sit on his chair_. I do not hold it legitimate in him
to 'sneak off' with Mr. Smith--and smoke.
Fortunately, however, once he is there, little else is expected of
him--and nothing that a man should not be willing to do for his wife. A
smile, an attentive manner, the general effect of having combed his hair
and washed behind his ears, a word now and then to show that he is awake
(I am assuming that he controls the tendency to wriggle)--and no more is
needed. He is a lay figure, but not necessarily a lay figure of speech.
Unless a man who is taken to call is of an abnormally lively
conversational habit, quick to think of something that may pass
for a contribution to current thought, and even quicker to get it
out, he had best accept his position as merely decorative, and try
to be as decorative as possible. He should be so quick that the first
words of his sentence have leaped into life before he is himself
aware of what is to come hurrying after them; he may be so slow
that the only sentence he has is still painfully climbing to the
surface long after the proper time for its appearance has passed
and been forgotten. Swallow it, my dear sir, swallow it. Silence,
accompanied by a wise, appreciative glance of the eye, is better;
for a man who has mastered the art of the wise look does his wife
credit, and is taken home from a call with his faculties unimpaired
and his self-respect undiminished: he is the same man as when he was
taken out. But not so the man who starts, hesitates, and stops, as if
he actually said, 'Hold-on-there-I-'ve-got-a-fine-idea--but--er--on
second thought--er--I--er--that is--I guess--er--it isn't--worth hearing.'
Such a man, I say, adds little to the pleasure of himself or the
company; he attracts attention only to disappoint it: and others are
kind as well as sensible to ignore him. He should have kept on rapidly
and developed his fine idea to the bitter end. Nor is it wise to attempt
to shine, to dazzle, to surprise with a clever epigram, thoughtfully
composed and tested by imaginary utterance before an imaginary charmed
circle while dressing; for nothing so diminishes confidence in an
epigram as successive failures to get it into circulation. In calling,
one must jump on the train of thought as it speeds by a way station; and
there is no happy mean between jumping on a passing train and standing
still on the platform--except, as I have suggested, a pleasant wave of
the hand as the train passes.
'There are not many situations,' said Dr. Johnson, 'more incessantly
uneasy than that in which the man is placed who is watching an
opportunity to speak, without courage to take it when offered, and who,
though he resolves to give a specimen of his abilities, always finds
some reason or other for delaying to the next minute.'
I know that resolve; and yet how often have I, too, failed at the
crucial moment to give the hoped-for specimen of my abilities! 'Not
yet,' I have said to myself, 'not yet. The time is not ripe.' And so I
have waited, incessantly uneasy,--as Dr. Johnson well puts it,--but
always finding some reason or other to postpone the fireworks. I was
beset by a kind of gross selfishness--an unwillingness to give _anybody_
a specimen of my abilities. Let them chatter! Little do they guess--and
never will they know--the abilities sitting on this chair! Give _them_ a
specimen! Yet I must confess also that my specimen seemed somehow
isolated and apart from my environment. It was all right in itself, but
it needed a setting; it was like a button without a coat, like an eye
without a face, like a kiss without a companion.
THE LIER IN BED
If I had to get on with but one article of furniture, I think I would
choose a bed. One could if necessary sit, eat, read, and write in the
bed. In past time it has been a social centre: the hostess received in
it, the guests sat on benches, and the most distinguished visitor sat on
the foot of the bed. It combines the uses of all the other articles in
the '$198 de luxe special 4-room outfit' that I have seen advertised for
the benefit of any newly married couple with twenty dollars of their own
for the first payment. Very few houses, if any, nowadays are without
furniture that nobody uses, chairs that nobody ever sits on, books that
nobody ever reads, ornaments that nobody ever wants, pictures that
nobody ever looks at; an accumulation of unessential objects that does
credit chiefly to the activity of manufacturers and merchants catering
to our modern lust for unnecessary expenditure. Not so many centuries
ago one or two books made quite a respectable library; dining-room
tables were real banqueting boards laid on trestles and taken away after
the banquet; one bench might well serve several Perfect Gentlemen to sit
upon; and a chair of his own was the baron's privilege. Today the $198
de luxe special 4-room outfit would feel naked and ashamed without its
'1 Pedestal' and '1 Piece of Statuary.' Yet what on earth does a happy
couple, bravely starting life with twenty dollars, want of a pedestal
and a piece of statuary? And I notice also that the outfit--'a complete
home,' says the description--makes no provision for a kitchen; but
perhaps they are no longer de luxe.
It is impossible, at this time, to recover with complete certainty the
antiquity of the bed. We may presume that the Neanderthal man had a wife
(as wives were then understood) and maintained a kind of housekeeping
that may have gone no further than pawing some leaves together to sleep
on; but this probably was a late development. Earlier we may imagine the
wind blowing the autumn leaves together and a Neanderthal man lying down
by chance on the pile. He found it pleasant, and, for a few thousand
years, went out of his way to find piles of leaves to lie down on, until
one day he hit upon the bright idea of piling the leaves together
himself. Then for the first time a man had a bed. His sleep was
localized; his pile of leaves, brought together by his own sedulous
hands, became property. Monogamy was encouraged, and the idea of home
came into being. Personally I have no doubt whatever that the man who
made the first bed was so charmed with it that the practice of lying in
bed in the morning began immediately; and it is probably a conservative
statement that the later Pliocene era saw the custom well developed.
One wonders what the Neanderthal man would have thought of a de luxe
4-room outfit, or complete home, for $198.
Even to-day, however, there are many fortunate persons who are never
awakened by an alarm-clock--that watchman's rattle, as it were, of
Policeman Day. The invention is comparatively recent. Without trying to
uncover the identity of the inventor, and thus adding one more to the
Who's Who of Pernicious Persons, we may assume that it belongs naturally
to the age of small and cheap clocks which dawned only in the
nineteenth century. Some desire for it existed earlier. The learned Mrs.
Carter, said Dr. Johnson, 'at a time when she was eager in study, did
not awake as early as she wished, and she therefore had a contrivance
that, at a certain hour, her chamber light should burn a string to which
a heavy weight was suspended, which then fell with a sudden strong
noise; this roused her from her sleep, and then she had no difficulty in
getting up.'
This device, we judge, was peculiar to Mrs. Carter, than whom a less
eager student would have congratulated herself that the sudden strong
noise was over, and gone sweetly to sleep again. The venerable Bishop
Ken, who believed that a man 'should take no more sleep than he can take
at once,' had no need of it. He got up, we are told, at one or two
o'clock in the morning 'and sometimes earlier,' and played the lute
before putting on his clothes.
To me the interesting thing about these historic figures is that they
got up with such elastic promptness, the one to study and the other to
play the lute. The Bishop seems a shade the more eager; but there are
details that Mrs. Carter would naturally have refrained from mentioning
to Dr. Johnson, even at the brimming moment when he had just accepted
her contribution to the _Rambler_. For most of us--or alarm-clocks would
not be made to ring continuously until the harassed bed-warmer gets up
and stops the racket--this getting out of bed is no such easy matter;
and perhaps it will be the same when Gabriel's trumpet is the
alarm-clock. We are more like Boswell, honest sleeper, and have 'thought
of a pulley to raise me gradually'; and then have thought again and
realized that even a pulley 'would give me pain, as it would counteract
my internal disposition.' Let the world go hang; our internal
disposition is to stay in bed: we cling tenaciously to non-existence--or
rather, to that third state of consciousness when we are in the world
but not of it.
There are those, no doubt, who will say that they have something better
to do than waste their time wondering why they like to stay in bed,
which they don't. They are persons who have never been bored by the
monotony of dressing or have tried to vary it, sometimes beginning at
one end, sometimes at the other, but always defeated by the hard fact
that a man cannot button his collar until he has put on his shirt. If
they condescend so far, they will say, with some truth, that it is a
question of weather, and any fool knows that it is not pleasant to get
out of a warm bed into a cold bedroom. The matter has been considered
from that angle. 'I have been warm all night,' wrote Leigh Hunt, 'and
find myself in a state perfectly suited to a warm-blooded animal. To get
out of this state into the cold, besides the inharmonious and uncritical
abruptness of the transition, is so unnatural to such a creature that
the poets, refining upon the tortures of the damned, make one of their
greatest agonies consist in being suddenly transported from heat to
cold--from fire to ice. They are "haled" out of their "beds," says
Milton, by "harpy-footed furies"--fellows who come to call them.'
But no man, say I, or woman either, ever lay in bed and devised logical
reasons for staying there--unless for the purposes of an essay, in which
case the recumbent essayist, snuggle as he may, is mentally up and
dressed. He is really awake. He has tied his necktie. He is a busy
bee--and I can no more imagine a busy bee lying in bed than I can
imagine lying in bed with one. He is no longer in the nice balance
between sense and oblivion that is too serenely and irresponsibly
comfortable to be consciously analyzed; and in which, so long as he can
stay there without getting wider awake, nothing else matters.
Lying in bed being a half-way house between sleeping and waking, and the
mind then equally indifferent to logic and exact realism, the lier in
bed can and does create his own dreams: it is an inexpensive and
gentlemanly pleasure. If his bent is that way, he becomes Big Man Me:
Fortunatus's purse jingles in his pocket; the slave jumps when he rubs
the lamp; he excels in all manly sports. If you ask with what authority
I can thus postulate the home-made dreams of any lier in bed but myself,
the answer is easy. It is common knowledge that the half-awake minds of
men thus employ themselves, and the fashion of their employment may be
reasonably deduced from observation of individuals. The _ego_ even of a
modest man will be somewhat rampant; the _ego_ of a conceited one would,
barring its capability for infinite expansion, swell up and bust. But
this riot of egoism has as little relation to the Fine Art of Lying in
Bed as a movie play has to the fine art of the drama. The true artist
may take fair advantage of his nice state of unreason to defy time and
space, but he will respect essential verities. He will treat his _ego_
like the child it is; and, taking example from a careful mother, tie a
rope to it when he lets it out to play. Thus he will capture a kind of
immortality; and his lying in bed, a transitory state itself, will
contradict the transitory character of life outside of it. Companions he
has known and loved will come from whatever remote places to share these
moments, for the Fine Art of Lying in Bed consists largely in
cultivating that inward eye with which Wordsworth saw the daffodils.
Whether this can be done on the wooden pillow of the Japanese I have no
way of knowing; but I suspect there were some admirable liers in bed
among the Roman patricians who were grossly accused of effeminacy
because they slept on feathers.
The north of China, where bedding is laid in winter on raised platforms
gently heated by little furnaces underneath, must have produced some
highly cultivated liers in bed. The proverbial shortness of the German
bed (which perhaps explains the German _Kultur_) may have tended to
discourage the art and at the same time unconsciously stimulated a
hatred of England, where the beds are proverbially generous. One can at
least hope, however, that all beds are alike in this matter, provided
the occupant is a proper lier, who can say fairly,--
My bed has legs
To run away
From Here and Now
And Everyday.
It trots me off
From slumber deep
To the Dear Land
Of Half-Asleep.
TO BORE OR NOT TO BORE
'Take me away,' said Thomas Carlyle, when silence settled for a moment
over a dinner-table where one of the diners had been monologuing to the
extreme limit of boredom, 'for God's sake take me away and put me in a
room by myself and give me a pipe of tobacco!'
Little as we may otherwise resemble Carlyle, many of us have felt this
emotion; and some realize (although the painful suspicion comes from a
mind too analytical for its own comfort) that we may have occasioned it.
The nice consideration for the happiness of others which marks a
gentleman may even make him particularly susceptible to this haunting
apprehension. Carlyle defined the feeling when he said, 'To sit still
and be pumped into is never an exhilarating process.' But pumping is
different. How often have I myself, my adieus seemingly done, my hat in
my hand and my feet on the threshold, taken a fresh grip, hat or no hat,
on the pump-handle, and set good-natured, Christian folk distressedly
wondering if I would never stop! And how often have I afterward recalled
something strained and morbidly intent in their expressions, a
glassiness of the staring eye and a starchiness in the smiling lip, that
has made me suffer under my bed-cover and swear that next time I would
depart like a sky-rocket!
Truly it seems surprising, in a fortunate century when the
correspondence school offers so many inexpensive educational advantages
for deficient adults, that one never sees an advertisement--
STOP BEING A BORE!
If you _bore people_ you can't be loved.
_Don't you want to be loved?_ Don't YOU?
Then sign and mail this coupon _at once_.
Let Dynamo Doit teach you through his
famous mail course, _How not to be a Bore_.
The explanation, I fancy, must be that people who sign and mail coupons
_at once_ do not know when they are bored; that the word 'boredom,' so
hopelessly heavy with sad significance to many of us, is nevertheless
but caviar to the general and no bait at all for an enterprising
correspondence school.
A swift survey of literature, from the Old Testament down, yields some
striking discoveries. To take an example, Job does not appear to have
regarded Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar as bores. And there is Bartlett's
_Familiar Quotations_, out of which one can familiarly quote nothing
about boredom earlier than Lord Byron. The subject has apparently never
been studied, and the broad division into Bores Positive and Bores
Negative is so recent that I have but this minute made it myself.
The Bore Positive pumps; the Bore Negative compels pumping. Unlike
Carlyle, he regards being pumped into as an exhilarating process, and
so, like the Old Man of the Sea on Sinbad's tired shoulders, he sits
tight and says nothing; the difference being that, whereas the Old Man
kept Sinbad walking, the Bore Negative keeps his victim talking. Charlie
Wax--who lives down town in the shop-window and is always so
well-dressed--would be a fine Bore Negative if one were left alone with
him under compulsion to keep up a conversation.
Boredom, in fact, is an acquired distaste--a by-product of the
printing-press and steam-engine, which between them have made and kept
mankind busier than Solomon in all his wisdom could have imagined. Our
arboreal ancestor could neither bore nor be bored. We see him--with the
mind's eye--up there in his tree, poor stupid, his think-tank (if the
reader will forgive me a word which he or she may not have _quite_
accepted) practically empty; nothing but a few primal, inarticulate
thinks at the bottom. It will be a million years or so yet before his
progeny will say a long farewell to the old home in the tree; and even
then they will lack words with which to do the occasion justice.
Language, in short, must be invented before anybody can be bored with
it. And I do not believe, although I find it stated in a ten-volume
Science-History of the Universe, that 'language is an internal
necessity, begotten of a lustful longing to express, through the
plastic vocal energy, man's secret sense of his ability to interpret
Nature.' An internal necessity, yes--except in the case of the Bore
Negative, who prefers to listen; but quite as likely begotten of man's
anything but secret sense of his ability to interpret himself.
Speech grew slowly; and mankind, now a speaking animal, had
centuries--nay, epochs--in which to become habituated to the
longwindedness that Job accepted as a matter of course in Eliphaz,
Bildad, and Zophar. So that even to-day many, like Job, Eliphaz, Bildad,
and Zophar, bore and are bored without really knowing it.
In the last analysis a bore bores because he keeps us from something
more interesting than himself. He becomes a menace to happiness in
proportion as the span of life is shortened by an increasing number of
things to do and places to go between crib and coffin. Coleridge's
Ancient Mariner, full of an unusual personal experience that the
leisurely reader finds most horridly entertaining, bored the Wedding
Guest because at that moment the Wedding Guest wanted to get to the
wedding, and was probably restrained from violence only by the
subconscious thought that it is not good form to appear at such
functions with a missing button. But the Mariner was too engrossed in
his own tale to notice this lack of interest; and so invariably is the
Bore Positive: everything escapes him except his listener.
But no matter how well we know when we are bored, none of us can be
certain that he does not sometimes bore--not even Tammas. The one
certainty is that _I may bore_, and that on the very occasion when I
have felt myself as entertaining as a three-ring circus, I may in effect
have been as gay and chatty as a like number of tombstones. There are
persons, for that matter, who are bored by circuses and delighted by
tombstones. My mistake may have been to put all my conversational eggs
in one basket--which, indeed, is a very good way to bore people.
Dynamo Doit, teaching his class of industrious correspondents, would
probably write them, with a picture of himself shaking his fist to
emphasize his point: 'Do not try to exhaust your subject. You will only
exhaust your audience. Never talk for more than three minutes on any
topic. Wear a wrist-watch _and keep your eye on it_. If at the end of
_three minutes_ you cannot change the subject, tell one of the following
anecdotes.' And I am quite sure also that Professor Doit would write to
his class: 'Whatever topic you discuss, _discuss it originally_. Be apt.
Be bright. Be pertinent. Be _yourself_. Remember always that it is not
so much what you say as the _way you say it_ that will charm your
listener. Think clearly. Illustrate and drive home your meaning with
illuminating figures--the sort of thing that your hearer will remember
and pass on to others as "another of So-and-so's _bon-mots_." Here you
will find that reading the "Wit and Humor" column in newspapers and
magazines is a great help. And speak plainly. Remember that unless you
are _heard_ you cannot expect to _interest_. On this point, dear
student, I can do no better than repeat Lord Chesterfield's advice to
his son: "Read what Cicero and Quintilian say of enunciation."'
But perhaps, after all, enunciation is no more important than
renunciation; and the first virtue that we who do not wish to be bores
must practise is abstemiousness of self. I know it is hard, but I do not
mean total abstinence. A man who tried to converse without his _I's_
would make but a blind stagger at it. This short and handsome word (as
Colonel Roosevelt might have said) is not to be utterly discarded
without danger of such a silence as would transform the experimenter
into a Bore Negative of the most negative description. Practically
deprived of speech, he would become like a Charlie Wax endowed with
locomotion and provided with letters of introduction. But one can at
least curb the pronoun, and, with shrewd covert glances at his
wrist-watch, confine the personally conducted tour into and about Myself
within reasonable limits. Let him say bravely in the beginning, 'I will
not talk about Myself for more than thirty minutes by my wrist-watch';
then reduce it to twenty-five; then to twenty--and so on to the
irreducible minimum; and he will be surprised to feel how his popularity
increases with leaps and bounds at each reduction--provided, of course,
that he finds anything else to talk about.
Your Complete Bore, however, is incapable of this treatment, for he does
not know that he is a bore. It is only the Occasional Bore, a sensitive,
well-meaning fellow who would not harm anybody, whose head lies
sleepless on a pillow hot with his blushes while he goes over and over
so apt and tripping a dialogue that it would withhold Gabriel from
blowing his trumpet. So it seems to him in his bed; but alas, these
dialogues are never of any practical use. They comfort, but they do not
cure. For no person ever talks to us as we talk to ourselves. The
better way is to decide firmly (1) to get a wrist-watch, and (2) to get
to sleep.