tea cannot but rejoice at the recent invention of an oval, platter-like
saucer, large enough to hold with ease a cup, a lettuce or other
sandwich, and a dainty trifle of pastry. The thing was needed: the
modesty of the anonymous inventor--evidently _not_ Mr. Edison--reveals
him one of the large body of occasional and unwilling tea-goers. We, the
reluctant and unwilling, are all strangely alike at these functions; and
we have all been embarrassed by the old-fashioned saucer. Circular in
shape, and hardly larger than the cup that belies its reputation and
dances drunkenly whenever another guest joggles our elbow,--which
happens so often that we suspect conspiracy,--the old-fashioned saucer
affords no reasonably secure perch for a sandwich; responds with delight
to the law of gravitation if left to itself; and sets us wishing, those
of us who think scientifically, that evolution had refrained from doing
away with an extension by which alone we could now hope to manage it.
_We mean a tail!_ If afternoon teas had been started in the Oligocene
Epoch instead of the seventeenth century, we are convinced that
evolution, far from discarding this useful appendage, would have
perfected it. A little hand would have evolved at the end of it--such a
one as might hold a Perfect Gentleman's saucer while he sipped from his
tea-cup.
Nay, more. In many ways that will at once occur to the intelligent
reader this little hand would be helpful in our complex modern
civilization. It would hold this essay. It would turn the music at the
piano. It would enable two well-disposed persons cordially to shake
hands when their four other hands were busy with bundles. It would slap
the coward mosquito that stabs in the back. It would be absolutely
perfect for waving farewell. Nor would there be anything 'funny' about
it, or shocking to the most refined sensibilities: the vulgar would
laugh and the refined would hide a shudder at the sight of a man with no
tail! We would, of course, all look like the Devil, but everybody knows
that _his_ tail has never yet kept him out of polite society.
This digression, however, leads us away from our subject into alien
regrets. We put it behind us.
The truth is, we do not like your afternoon teas--except those little
ones, like the nice children of an objectionable mother, that are
informal, intimate, and not destructive of our identity. At larger
gatherings we have no identity: we are supernumeraries, mere tea-cup
bearers, wooden Indians who have been through Hampton, hand-carved
gentlemen, automaton tea-goers. In short, we are so many lay figures,
each with a tea-cup in one hand and food in the other; we know that we
are smiling because we can feel it; we remain where we are laid until
forcibly moved to another spot, and we are capable, under pressure, of
emitting a few set phrases that resemble human speech.
Yet within this odd simulacrum of a worldly, entertaining, and
interested gentleman, a living mind surveys the gay scene with a
strange, emotionless detachment--just so, perhaps, will it eventually
survive the body. We are really alive, conscious that we dislike
change, nervous when moved and stood up in another place, and
intellectually certain that no real harm can come to us. One is reminded
of Seneca's observation: _Vere magnum, habere fragilitatem hominis,
securitatem dei._ There is about us something of the frailty of a man,
something of the security of a god; the pity of it is that we cannot
follow Seneca to his conclusion and comfort ourselves with the thought
that we are 'truly great.'
I have often wondered, while 'dolling up,' as the strikingly appropriate
modernism puts it, for such a function, whether there is any universal
reason why a reluctant man should go to an afternoon tea. There are, of
course, many individual reasons, more or less important to the
individual tea-goer; but for us the impulsion comes inevitably from
without. The verb 'drag,' often applied to the process by which a man is
brought to a tea, indicates how valuable would be the discovery of a
Universal Reason wherefore any man might hope to derive some personal
good from this inescapable experience.
An excellent place for the thinker to examine this problem is in his
bath-tub preparatory to dolling up. He is alone and safe from
interruption, unless he has forgotten to lock the door; his memory and
observation of afternoon teas past is stimulated by afternoon tea to
come; and he is himself more like the Universal Man than on most other
occasions. Featherless biped mammals that we are, what need have we in
common that might conceivably provide a good and sufficient reason for
the dolling up to which I am about to subject myself? Substantial food,
less fleeting, however, than a lettuce or other sandwich and a dainty
trifle of pastry; protective clothing; a house, or even a cave, to
shelter us in cold or stormy weather--these, evidently, are clearly
apprehended necessities, and we will march on the soles of our feet,
like the plantigrade creatures we are, wherever such goods are
obtainable.
If all men were hungry, naked, and homeless, and the afternoon tea
provided food, clothes, and a home, any man would jump at an invitation.
But there are other necessities of living--and here, too, I in my
porcelain dish am one with Christopher Columbus, Lord Chesterfield,
Chang the Chinese Giant, the Editor of the _Atlantic_, and the humblest
illiterate who never heard of him--of which we are not so vividly
conscious. Yet we seek them instinctively, each in his own manner and
degree--amusement, useful experience, friends, and his own soul. So I
read and accept Tagore when he says, 'Man's history is the history of
man's journey to the unknown in quest of his immortal self--his soul.'
Willy-nilly, even higglety-pigglety and helter-skelter, these are what
the featherless biped is after.
As for useful experience, this afternoon tea reminds me of those lower
social gatherings where liquor is, or used to be, sold only to be drunk
on the premises. Granting that I become a finished tea-goer, easy of
speech, nodding, laughing, secure in the graceful manipulation of my
tea-things, never upsetting my tea, never putting my sandwich in the way
of an articulating tongue, yet is all this experience of no use whatever
to me except at other afternoon teas. I go to school simply to learn how
to go to school. The most finished and complete tea-goer, if he behaves
anywhere else as he does at an afternoon tea, creates more widely the
same unfavorable impression that he creates, in his own proper sphere,
on me. Can I then reasonably regard experience as useful which I observe
to be useful only for doing something which I observe to be useless? The
soap agrees that I cannot. Yet, says the sponge, _if_ I might hope at
some afternoon tea to discover my immortal soul, the case would be
different; this experience would be valuable. O foolish sponge! I am
compelled to tell you that at afternoon teas it is especially difficult
for a mortal gentleman to believe that he has any immortal soul to look
for. It is a gathering essentially mundane and ephemeral. For it we put
on our most worldly garments. For it we practise our most worldly smirks
in dumb rehearsal before our mirror and an audience of one silly,
attentive image, thinking that this time, this time--But it is always
the same: the observant mind in the immovable body. As for the immortal
soul, O sponge! it may, and doubtless does, go to strange places--but it
_cannot be dragged_.
And so we come to the final question: is the afternoon tea a place where
one featherless, plantigrade, biped mammal of the genus _Homo_ may meet
another whom he might hope some time to call a friend? I do not mean 'my
friend What's-his-name?' but rather such another biped as Tennyson had
in mind when he wrote,--
Since we deserved the name of friends
And thine effect so lives in me,
A part of mine may live in thee
And move thee on to noble ends.
I grant you, peering out of my tub at the world, that there are many to
whom this thought sounds sublimated and extravagant: a poet says this
sort of thing because such is his poetic business. We come nearer
perhaps to the universal understanding in John Hay's definition that
'Friends are the sunshine of life'; for it is equally true that all men
seek sunlight and that every man seeks a friend after his own kind and
nature. The best and most intelligent of us admit the rarity and value
of friendship; the worst and most ignorant of us are unwittingly the
better for knowing some friendly companion. But these afternoon teas are
inimical to friendship; and the first duty of a hostess is to separate,
expeditiously and without hope of again coming together, any other two
guests who appear to be getting acquainted. On this count, even were we
not Automaton Tea-Goers, debarred by inherent stability from any normal
human intercourse, the afternoon tea must prove more disheartening than
helpful. We might at best glimpse a potential friend as the desert
islander sights a passing sail on the far horizon.
There is, alas, no Universal Reason why a man should go to an afternoon
tea!
So the matter looks to me in my tub, but perhaps, like Diogenes, I am a
cynic philosopher. After all, when a thing cannot be escaped, why seek
for reasons not to escape it? Let us, rather, be brave if we cannot be
gay; cheerful if we cannot talk; ornamental if we cannot move. As the
grave-digger in Elsinore churchyard might say: 'Here lies the afternoon
tea; good: here stands the gentleman; good: If the gentleman go to this
afternoon tea and bore himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes,--mark
you that? But if the afternoon tea come to him and bore him, he bores
not himself; argal, he that goes not willingly to the afternoon tea
wearies not his own life.'
So, in effect, he that is _dragged_ to an afternoon tea does not go at
all; and when he gets there, he is really somewhere else. This happy
thought is a little difficult to reconcile with circumstances; but when
one has become thoroughly soaked in it, it is a great help.
THE END
Transcriber's Note:
Minor typographical errors have been corrected without note.
End of Project Gutenberg's The Perfect Gentleman, by Ralph Bergengren