rate for not being much of a bore,--and that is, never to make a call,
or talk to one person, or to several at once, for more than fifteen
minutes. Fifteen minutes is not really a very long time, although it may
seem so. But to apply this rule successfully one must become adept in
the Fine Art of Going Away. Resting your left hand negligently on your
right knee, so that the wrist protrudes with an effect of careless grace
from the cuff, you have glanced at your watch and observed that the
fifteen minutes are up. You get up yourself. Others get up--or, if there
is but one other, she. So far, so good. But now that everybody is up,
new subjects of conversation, as if catching this rising infection, come
up also. You are in a position in which, except by rather too oratorical
or dramatic a gesture, you cannot look at your watch; more than that, if
you bore a person sitting down and wondering when you are going to get
up, you bore far worse a person standing up and wondering when you will
go away. That you have in effect started to go away--and not gone
away--and yet must go away some time--and may go away at any minute:
this consciousness, to a person standing first on one tired foot and
then on the other, rapidly becomes almost, but never quite, unendurable.
Reason totters, but remains on the throne. One can almost lay down a
law: _Two persons who do not part with kisses should part with haste._
The way to do is to go like the sky-rocket--up and out.
But the fifteen-minute call followed by the flying exit is at best only
a niggling and unsatisfactory solution; it is next door to always
staying at home. Then certainly you would never be a bore (except to the
family); but neither by any possibility could you ever be that most
desirable factor in life, the Not-Bore. The Hermit is a slacker. Better
far to come out of your cave, mingle, bore as little as may be--and
thank Heaven that here and there you meet one whom you somehow feel
reasonably certain that you do not bore.
WHERE TOILS THE TAILOR
Of the several places in which a man waits to have something done to
him, no other is so restful as the establishment of his tailor. His
doctor and his dentist do their best with inviting chairs and a pile of
magazines on the table: one gets an impression that both of them were
once liberal subscribers to the current periodicals, but stopped a year
or two ago and have never bought a magazine since. But these, in their
official capacity, are painful gentlemen; and a long procession of
preceding patients have imparted to the atmosphere of their
waiting-rooms a heavy sense of impending misery.
The tailor is different. 'There was peace,' wrote Meredith, 'in Mr.
Goren's shop. Badgered ministers, bankrupt merchants, diplomatists with
a headache,--any of our modern grandees under difficulties,--might have
envied that peace over which Mr. Goren presided: and he was an enviable
man. He loved his craft, he believed he had not succeeded the millions
of antecedent tailors in vain.'
And so it is, I dare say, in varying degree with all tailors; or at any
rate should be, for tailor and customer meet on the pleasantest
imaginable plane of congenial interest. A person whose chief desire in
life at the moment is to be becomingly dressed comes to one whose chief
ambition in life at the moment is to becomingly dress him. No hideous
and insistent apprehension preys on the mind of the waiting customer;
for the tailor's worst tool is a tape-measure, and his worst discovery
may be that the customer is growing fat. One waits, indeed, without
serious apprehension, at the barber's; but here the company is mixed and
the knowledge inescapable that it will look on with idle interest while
he cuts your hair or covers your honest face with lather. Only the
harmless necessary assistant will see you measured, and he, by long
practise, has acquired an air of remoteness and indifference that makes
him next thing to invisible. So complete indeed is this tactful
abstraction that one might imagine him a man newly fallen in love.
I have seen it stated, though I cannot remember just where, that the Old
Testament makes no mention of the tailor; the Book, however, shows
plainly that Solomon was not only a sage but also a best-dresser, and it
stands to reason that his wives did not make his clothes. One wife might
have done it, but not three hundred. A tailor came at intervals to the
palace, and then went back to where, somewhere in the business section
of the ancient city, there was doubtless a tablet with a cuneiform
inscription:--
I am he that makes the
Glory of Solomon: yea,
and Maker of the Upper
and the Nether Glory.
The Smart Set of Solomon's day patronized him, yet he remained, quite
naturally, beneath the notice of the Old Testament writers--unfashionable
men, one may readily believe, living at a convenient period when a
garment very much like our own bath-robe answered their own purposes,
and could probably be bought ready-to-wear.
But one can no more think of a full-blown civilization without tailors
than one can imagine a complex state of society in which, for example,
the contemporary _Saturday Evening Post_ would publish its Exclusive
Saturday Evening Styles, and gentlemen would habitually buy their
patterns by bust-measure and cut out their new suits at home on the
dining-room table. The idea may seem practical, but the bust with men is
evidently not a reliable guide to all the other anatomical proportions.
Nor, again, however little the Old Testament concerns itself with
tailors, did it fail to mention the first of them. The line goes back to
Adam, cross-legged under the Tree--the first tailor and the first
customer together--companioned, pleasantly enough, by the first 'little
dressmaker.' They made their clothes together, and made them alike--an
impressive, beautiful symbol of the perfect harmony between the sexes
that the world lost and is now slowly regaining.
Times have changed since Adam: the apron of his honest anxious
handicraft--for it was the penalty of his sin that he would never be
happy until he got it finished and put it on--has undergone many
changes, in the course of which even its evolution into Plymouth Rock
Pants, yes even those once seemingly eternal lines,--
When the pant-hunter pantless
Is panting for pants,--
are now fading from human memory; yet until within the past few decades
a gentleman had a tailor as inexorably as he had a nose. But now the
immemorial visit to his tailor is no longer absolutely necessary. He
may, if such is his inclination,--as I am sure it would have been
Adam's,--get his new suit all finished and ready-to-wear. Charley Wax,
the sartorially Perfect Gentleman, smiles invitation and encouragement
from many a window; an army of elegant and expeditious employees, each
as much like Charley Wax as is humanly possible, waits to conduct him to
a million ready-to-wear suits. His intellect is appealed to by the
plausible argument that we live in a _busy time_, in which the _leaders
of men_ simply cannot _afford to waste_ their valuable hours by going to
the tailor: at the ready-to-wear emporium you simply pay your money and
take your choice.
Many a gentleman, suddenly discovering that he is a 'leader of men,' has
deserted his tailor: many a gentleman, learning by experience that it
takes as long to try on clothes in one place as another, has presently
gone back to him. Starting with the democratic premise that all men are
born equal, the ready-to-wear clothier proceeds on the further
assumption that each man becomes in time either short, stout, or
medium; and this amendment to the Declaration of Independence has indeed
created a new republic of shorts, stouts, and mediums, in which Charley
Wax is the perpetual president. Here, indeed, would seem to be a step
toward patterns for gentlemen: one sees the gentleman in imagination
happily cutting out his new spring suit on the dining-room table, or
sitting cross-legged on that centre of domestic hospitality, while he
hums a little tune to himself and merrily sews the sections together.
But unfortunately the shorts, stouts, and mediums are not respectively
standard according to bust-measure. A gentleman, for example, may
simultaneously be short in the legs, medium in the chest, and stout in
the circumference: the secret of the ready-to-wear clothier lies in his
ability to meet on the spot conditions which no single pattern could
hope to anticipate. We must go back toward nature, and stop short at
Adam, to find a costume that any gentleman can successfully make for
himself.
Personally I prefer the immemorial visit to the tailor; I like this
restful atmosphere, in which unborn suits of clothes contentedly await
creation in rolls of cloth, and the styles of the season are exhibited
by pictures of gentlemen whose completely vacuous countenances
comfortably repudiate the desirability of being 'leaders of men.' On the
table the _Geographical Magazine_ invites to unexciting wonder at the
way other people dress. From the next room one hears the voice of the
tailor, leisurely reporting to his assistant as he tape-measures a
customer. In the lineage of a vocation it is odd to think that his
great-great-great grandfather might have sat cross-legged to inspire the
poem
A carrion crow sat on an oak
Watching a tailor shape a coat.
'Wife, bring me my old bent bow
That I may shoot yon carrion crow.'
The tailor shot, and he missed the mark,
And shot the miller's sow through the heart.
'Wife, O, wife, bring brandy in a spoon,
For the old miller's sow is in a swoon.'
The quick and unexpected tragedy (for the sow) etches the old-time
tailor at his work: one gets, as it were, a crow's-eye view of him.
Such, I imagine, was his universal aspect, cross-legged on a bench in
his little stall or beside his open window, more skilled with shears and
needle than with lethal weapon, despite the gallant brigade of tailors
who went to battle under the banner of Queen Elizabeth. Yet I cannot
imagine my own tailor sitting cross-legged beside an open window; nor,
for that matter, sitting cross-legged anywhere, except perhaps on the
sands of the sea in his proper bathing-suit. His genealogy begins with
those 'taylours' who, in the nineteenth year of Henry VII, 'sewyd the
Kynge to be callyd Marchante Taylours'--evidently earning the disfavor
of their neighbors, for a 'grete grudge rose among dyuers other craftys
in the cyte against them.' Very soon, I fancy, these Marchante Taylours
began to pride themselves on the straightness of their legs, and let
subordinate craftsmen stretch their sartorius muscles. But why, as
Carlyle puts it, the idea had 'gone abroad, and fixed itself down in a
wide-spreading rooted error, that Tailors are a distinct species in
Physiology, not Men, but fractional Parts of a Man,' nobody has yet
explained satisfactorily.
So one muses, comfortably awaiting the tailor, while the eye travels
through far countries, glimpsing now and then a graceful figure that
somehow reminds one of a darker complexioned September Morn, and helps
perhaps to explain the wide-spread popularity of a magazine whose title
seems at first thought to limit it to a public-school circulation.
And yet, strangely enough, there are men whose wives find it difficult
to persuade them to go to the tailor; or, for that matter to the
ready-to-wear clothier. There is, after all, something undignified in
standing on a little stool and being measured; nor is it a satisfactory
substitute for this procedure to put on strange garments in a little
closet and come forth to pose before mirrors under the critical eye of a
living Charley Wax. Fortunately the tailor and the polite and
expeditious salesman of the ready-to-wear emporium have this in common:
art or nature has in both cases produced a man seemingly with no sense
of humor. Fortunately, too, in both cases a gentleman goes alone to
acquire a new suit. I have seen it suggested in the advertising column
of the magazine that a young man should bring his fiancee with him, to
help select his ready-to-wear garments; but the idea emanates from the
imagination of an ad-writer, and I am sure that nobody concerned, except
perhaps the fiancee, would welcome it in actual practice. Wives indeed,
and maybe fiancees, sometimes accompany those they love when a hat is to
be tried on and purchased; but I have been told in bitter confidence by
a polite hatter that 'tis a custom more honored in the breach than in
the observance; and this I think is sufficient reason why it should not
be extended, so to speak, to the breeches.
SHAVING THOUGHTS
'Talking of shaving the other night at Dr. Taylor's,' wrote the
biographer Boswell, 'Dr. Johnson said, "Sir, of a thousand shavers, two
do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished." I thought this
not possible, till he specified so many of the varieties in
shaving,--holding the razor more or less perpendicular; drawing long or
short strokes; beginning at the upper part of the face, or the under; at
the right side or the left side. Indeed, when one considers what variety
of sounds can be uttered by the windpipe, in the compass of a very small
aperture, we may be convinced how many degrees of difference there may
be in the application of the razor.'
So they talked of shaving at Dr. Taylor's before the advent of the
safety-razor; and our curiosity can never be satisfied as to just what
so acute an observer as Dr. Johnson would have thought of this
characteristically modern invention to combine speed and convenience. I
can imagine Boswell playfully reminding the doctor how that illustrious
friend had quite recently expressed his disapproval of bleeding. 'Sir,'
says Samuel, as he actually did on another occasion, 'courage is a
quality necessary for maintaining virtue.' And he adds (blowing with
high derision), 'Poh! If a man is to be intimidated by the possible
contemplation of his own blood--let him grow whiskers.' At any rate
among a thousand shavers to-day, two do not think so much alike that one
may not be influenced by this consideration, and regard Byron, composing
his verses while shaving, as a braver poet than if he had performed the
operation with a safety.
The world of shavers is divided into three classes: the ordinary shaver,
the safety shaver, and the extraordinary-safety shaver, who buys each
safety razor as soon as it is invented and is never so happy as when
about to try a new one. To a shaver of this class, cost is immaterial. A
safety-razor for a cent, with twenty gold-monogramed blades and a
guaranty of expert surgical attendance if he cuts himself, would stir
his active interest neither more nor less than a safety-razor for a
hundred dollars, with one Cannotbedull blade and an iron-clad agreement
to pay the makers an indemnity if he found it unsatisfactory. He buys
them secretly, lest his wife justly accuse him of extravagance, and
practises cunning in getting rid of them afterward; for to a
conscientious gentleman throwing away a razor is a responsible matter.
It is hard to think of any place where a razor-blade, indestructible and
horribly sharp as it is,--for all purposes except shaving,--can be
thrown away without some worry over possible consequences. A baby may
find and swallow it; the ashman sever an artery; dropping it overboard
at sea is impracticable, to say nothing of the danger to some innocent
fish. Mailing it anonymously to the makers, although it is expensive, is
a solution, or at least shifts the responsibility. Perhaps the safest
course is to put the blades with the odds and ends you have been going
to throw away to-morrow ever since you can remember; for there, while
you live, nobody will ever disturb them. Once, indeed, I--but this is
getting too personal: I was simply about to say that it is possible to
purchase a twenty-five cent safety-razor, returnable if unsatisfactory,
and find the place of sale vanished before you can get back to it. But
between inventions in safety-razors, the extraordinary-safety shaver is
likely to revert to first principles and the naked steel of his
ancestors.
And as he shaves he will perhaps think sometimes of the unhappy Edward
II of England, who, before his fall, wore his beard in three corkscrew
curls--and was shaved afterward by a cruel jailer who had it done _with
cold water_! The fallen monarch wept with discomfort and indignation.
'Here at least,' he exclaimed reproachfully, 'is warm water on my
cheeks, whether you will or no.' But the heartless shave proceeded.
Razed away were those corkscrew curls from the royal chin, and so he
comes down to us without them, shaved as well as bathed in tears--one
of the most pitiful figures in history.
Personally, however, I prefer to think of kindlier scenes while shaving.
Nothing that I can do now can help poor Edward: no indignation of mine
can warm that cold water; perhaps, after all, the cruel jailer had a
natural and excusable hatred of corkscrew curls anywhere. I should feel
quite differently about it if he had warmed the water; but although a
man may shave himself with cold water, certainly nobody else has a right
to.
There have been periods in the history of man when I, too, would
probably have cultivated some form of whiskering. Perhaps, like Mr.
Richard Shute, I would have kept a gentleman (reduced) to read aloud to
me while my valet starched and curled my whiskers--such being the mode
in the seventeenth century when Mr. Shute was what they then called,
without meaning offense, a turkey merchant; and indeed his pride in his
whiskers was nothing out of the common. Or, being less able to support a
valet to starch and curl, and a gentleman to read aloud 'on some useful
subject,'--poor gentleman! I hope that he and Mr. Shute agreed as to
what subjects were useful, but I have a feeling they didn't,--I might
have had to economize, and might have been one of those who were 'so
curious in the management of their beards that they had pasteboard cases
to put over them at night, lest they turn upon them and rumple them in
their sleep.'
Nevertheless, wives continued to respect their husbands in about the
normal proportion. Within the relatively brief compass of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries, I, who would have gone smooth-shaven in the
fourteenth, could conceivably have fluttered in at least thirty-eight
separate and beautiful arrangements of moustaches, beard, and whiskers.
Nor, I suspect, did these arrangements always wait upon the slow
processes of nature. One does not _have_ to grow whiskers. Napoleon's
youthful officers were fiercely bewhiskered, but often with the aid of
helpfully adhesive gum; and in the eighteen-thirties there occurs in the
Boston _Transcript_, as a matter of course, an advertisement of
'gentlemen's whiskers ready-made or to order.' We see in imagination a
quiet corner at the whisker's, with a mirror before which the Bostonian
tries on his ready-made whiskers before ordering them sent home; or
again, the Bostonian in doubt, selecting now this whisker, now that
from the _Gentlemen's Own Whisker Book_, and still with a shade of
indecision on his handsome face as he holds it up to be measured.
'Perhaps, after all, those _other_ whiskers--'
But the brisk, courteous person with the dividers and tape-measure is
reassuring. 'Elegant whiskers!' he repeats at intervals. 'They will do
us both credit.'
The matter has, in fact, been intelligently studied; the beautifying
effect of whiskers reduced to principles. If my face is too wide, a
beard lengthens it; if my face is too narrow, it expands as if by magic
with the addition of what have sometimes been affectionately called
'mutton chops,' or 'siders'; if my nose projects, almost like a nose
trying to escape from a face to which it has been sentenced for life, a
pair of large, handsome moustaches will provide a proper entourage--a
nest, so to speak, on which the nose rests contentedly, almost like a
setting hen; if my nose retreats backward into my face, the aesthetic
solution is obviously galways. A stout gentleman can do wonders with his
appearance by adopting a pointed beard, and a suit of clothes, shirt,
necktie, and stockings with pronounced vertical stripes. A thin one, on
the other hand, becomes at once substantial in effect, without being
gross, if he cultivates side-whiskers, and wears a suit of clothes,
shirt, cravat, and stockings with pronounced horizontal stripes. If my
face lacks fierceness and dynamic force, it needs a brisk, arrogant
moustache; or if it has too much of these qualities, a long, sad,
drooping moustache will counterbalance them. I read in my volume of
_Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ that 'the movements of the
moustache are dependent on the muscle called _depressor alae nasi_. By
specially cultivating this muscle, men might in course of time make the
movements of the moustache subject to voluntary control.'
Just think what a capacity for emotional expression lies in such a
simple organ as the dog's caudal appendage, aptly called the
'psychographic tail' by Vischer; and moustaches are double, and
therefore equal to two psychographic appendages! Truly I know not of
which to think first--a happy gentleman wagging his moustache or a happy
dog wagging two tails. And yet here am I, shaving away the daily effort
of this double psychographic appendage to become visible! One might
almost think that my _depressor alae nasi_ was a vermiform appendix.
It has been said by some critics that whiskers are a disguise. I should
be unwilling to commit myself to this belief; nor can I accept the
contrary conviction that whiskers are a gift of Almighty Providence in
which the Giver is so sensitively interested that to shave them off is
to invite eternal punishment of a kind--and this, I think, destroys the
theory--that would singe them off in about two seconds. Whiskers are
real, and sometimes uncomfortably earnest; the belief that they betoken
an almost brutal masculine force is visible in this, that those whose
whiskers are naturally thinnest take the greatest satisfaction in
possessing them--seem, in fact, to say proudly, '_These_ are my
whiskers!' But I cannot feel that a gentleman is any more disguised by
his whiskers, real, ready-made, or made to order, than he would be if he
appeared naked or in a ready-made or made-to-order suit. Whiskers, in
fact, are a subtle revelation of real character, whether the kind that
exist as a soft, mysterious haze about the lower features or such as
inspired the immortal limerick,--I quote from memory,--
There was an old man with a beard
Who said, 'I am greatly afeard
Two larks and a hen,
A jay and a wren,
Have each made a nest in my beard.'
Yet I feel also, and strongly, that the man who shaves clean stands, as
it were, on his own face.
We have, indeed, but to visualize clearly the spectacle of a gentleman
shaving himself and put beside it the spectacle of a gentleman starching
and curling his whiskers, to see the finer personal dignity that has
come with the general adoption of the razor. I am not going to attempt
to describe a gentleman starching and curling his whiskers,--it would
be too horrible,--but I like to dwell on the shaver. He whistles or
perhaps hums. He draws hot water from the faucet--Alas, poor Edward! He
makes a rich, creamy lather either in a mug or (for the sake of literary
directness) on his own with a shaving-stick. He strops his razor, or
perhaps selects a blade already sharpened for his convenience. He rubs
in the lather. He shaves, and, as Dr. Johnson so shrewdly pointed out
that night at Dr. Taylor's, 'Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do not
shave so much alike as not to be distinguished.' Perhaps he cuts
himself, for a clever man at self-mutilation can do it, even with a
safety; but who cares? Come, Little Alum, the shaver's friend, smartly
to the rescue! And then, he exercises the shaver's prerogative and
powders his face.
Fortunately the process does not always go so smoothly. There are times
when the Local Brotherhood of Razors have gone on strike and refuse to
be stropped. There are times at which the twelve interchangeable blades
are hardly better for shaving than twelve interchangeable
postage-stamps. There are times when the lather might have been fairly
guaranteed to dry on the face. There are times when Little Alum, the
shaver's friend, might well feel the sting of his own powerlessness. But
these times are the blessed cause of genial satisfaction when everything
goes happily.
Truly it is worth while to grow a beard--for the sake of shaving it off.
Not such a beard as one might starch and curl--but the beginnings--an
obfuscation of the chin, cheeks, and upper lip--a horror of unseemly
growth--a landscape of the face comparable to
that ominous tract which, all agree,
Hides the Dark Tower
in Browning's grim poem of 'Childe Roland.' _Then_ is the time to strop
your favorite razor! I wonder, while stropping mine, if any man still
lives who uses a moustache cup?
OH, THE AFTERNOON TEA!