the tyranny of Things, and you will begin to dread becoming a slave to
mere possessions. You may still enjoy and admire the possessions of
others, but the ineffable bore of ownership will keep you content. The
responsibility of proprietorship will strike you with terror, gifts will
appal you, the opportunity of ridding yourself of one more unnecessary
thing will be welcomed as another stroke for freedom. Your friends'
houses will become your museums, and they the altruistic custodians,
allowing you the unalloyed sweets of appreciation with none of the
bitter responsibilities of possession.
For you, if you are of my kind, and would be free to fly light,
flitting, gipsy fashion, wherever and whenever the whim calls, must not
be anchored to an establishment. We must know and love our few
possessions as a father knows his children. We must be able to pack
them all in one box and follow them foot-loose. This is the new order
of Friars Minor, modern Paulists who have renounced the possession of
things, and by that vow of disinheritance, parting with the paltry
delights of monopoly, have been given the roving privilege of the whole
world!
*Costume and Custom*
A friend of mine has reduced his habit of dress to a system. Dressing
has long been known to be a fine art, but this enthusiast's endeavour
has been to make it a science as well--to give his theories practical
application to the routine of daily life. To do this, he has given his
coats and jackets all Anglo-Saxon names. His frock is called Albert,
for instance, his morning coat Cedric, a grey tweed jacket, Arthur, and
so on. His waistcoats masquerade under more poetic pseudonyms. A white
pique is known as Reginald, a spotted cashmere is Montmorency, and I
have seen this eccentric in a wonderful plaid vest hight Roulhac. His
trousers and pantaloons are distinguished by family names; I need only
mention such remarkable _aliases_ as Braghampton, a striped cheviot
garment, and a pair of tennis flannels denominated Smithers. His
terminology includes also appellations by which he describes his
neckwear--simple prefixes, such as "de" or "von" or "Mac" or "Fitz,"
modifying the name of the waistcoat, and titles for his hats, varying
from a simple "Sir" for a brown bowler to "Prince" for a silk topper of
the season's block.
Now, my mythical friend is not such a fool as you might think by this
description of his mania, for he is moved to this fantastic procedure by
a psychological theory. The gentleman is a private, if not a public,
benefactor, the joy of his friends and delight of his whole
acquaintance, for, never in the course of their experience, has he ever
appeared twice in exactly the same costume. It may differ from some
previous habilitation only by the tint of his gloves, but the change is
there with its subtile suggestion of newness. Indeed, this sartorial
dilettante prides himself, not so much upon the fact that his raiment is
never duplicated in combination, as that the changes are so slight as
not to be noticed without careful analysis. His maxim is that clothes
should not call attention to themselves either by their splendour or
their variety, but that the effect should be upon the emotions rather
than upon the eye. He holds that it should never be particularly
noticed whether a man dresses much or dresses well, but that the
impression should be of an immortal freshness, sustaining the confidence
of his friends that his garb shall have a pleasing note of composition.
It is to accomplish this that he has adopted the mnemonic system by
which to remember his changing combinations. He has but to say to his
valet: "Muggins, this morning you may introduce Earl Edgar von Courtenay
Blenkinsopp," and his man, familiar with the nomenclature of the
wardrobe, will, after his master has been bathed, shaved and
breakfasted, clothe the artist accordingly in Panama hat, sack coat,
cheerful fawn waistcoat, a tender heliotrope scarf and pin-check
trousers. Or perhaps, looking over the calendar, the man may announce
that this fantastic Earl has already appeared at the club, in which case
a manipulation of the tie or waistcoat changes von Courtenay to
O'Anstruther. The Earl must not, according to the rules, appear twice
in his full complement of costume. His existence is but for a day, but
Anstruther, the merry corduroy vest, may become a part of many
personalities.
So much for my friend Rigamarole, who does, if you like, carry his
principles to an extreme; but surely we owe it to our friends that our
clothes shall please. It is as necessary as that we should have clean
faces and proper nails. But, more than this, we owe it to ourselves
that we shall not be known by any hackneyed, unvarying garb. It need
not be taken for granted that we shall wear brown or blue, we should not
become identified with a special shape of collar. Servants must wear a
prescribed livery, priests must always appear clad in the cloth of their
office, and the soldier must be content with and proud of his uniform,
but free men are not forced to inflict a permanent visual impression
upon their fellows. He must follow the habit and style of the day, be of
his own class and period, and yet, besides, if he can, be himself always
characteristic, while always presenting a novel aspect. It is as
necessary for a man as for a woman, and, though the elements which he
may combine are fewer, they are capable of a certain kaleidoscopic
effect.
Our time is cursed more than any other has been, perhaps, with hard and
fast rules for men's costume; and of all clothing, evening dress, in
which, in the old days, was granted the greatest freedom of choice, is
now subject to the most rigid prescription. We must all appear like
waiters at dinner, but daylight allows tiny licences. Perhaps our
garments are always darkest just before dawn, and the new century may
emancipate men's personal taste. So far, at least, we may go: a frock
coat does not compel a tie of any particular colour, and a morning coat
does not invariably forbid a certain subdued animation in the way of
waistcoats. We may already choose between at least three styles of
collar and yet be received at five o'clock, and coloured shirts are
making a hard fight to oust the white linen which has reigned for more
than half a hundred years. It takes no great wealth to take advantage
of these minor opportunities, nor need one be pronounced a fop if one
uses one's chances well. He is safest who wears only what the best
tailor has advised every other of his customers, but who cares for a
tailor's model? Who cares, I might add, to be safe? There is safety in
numbers, but who ever remembers or cares for the victims of such
commonplace discretion? We are men, not mice; why should our coats be
all of the same fashionable hue and of the same length of tail?
But the times are changing, and we may look forward with confident hope
to the renascence of colour. Already we may see the signs of the change
that is approaching. God forbid that men should become the dandies of
the Regency, that we should ever ape the incredible or go without
pockets, but we may pray heartily for the wedding of Art and Reason.
Let us pray we shall no more wear cylinders or cap our skulls with
tight-fitting boxes! Meanwhile, I fear I must buy another necktie, for
my only one is well worn out. And Celestine swears she can recognize
that blue serge suit of mine, clear across the Park!
*Old Friends and New*
Old Friends, we say, are best, when some sudden disillusionment shakes
our faith in a new comrade. So indeed they are, yet I count many newly
made ties as stronger than those of my youth. "Keep close and hold my
hand; I am afraid, for an old friend is coming!" Celestine once
whispered to me while our love was young. How well I understood her
panic! She was swung by the conflicting emotions of loyalty and
oppression; her old friend had rights, but her new friend had
privileges. With me, a stranger, she was frankly herself; with him, a
familiar, she must be what he expected of her.
How shall we arrange the order of precedence for the late and early
comers into our hearts? How shall we adjudicate their conflicting
claims? That is the problem to be answered by everyone who lives
widely, and who would not have writ upon his gravestone: "He made more
friends than he could keep!" Were one content to pass from flower to
flower it would be easy enough, but I would gather a full, fragrant and
harmonious bouquet for my delight.
To one sensitively loyal, each new friend must at first sight seem to
come as a robber to steal a fragment of his heart from its rightful
owner. We say, "Make many acquaintances but few friends," we swear
undying devotion, and we promise to write every week; but, if we
practice this reserve, this fastidious partiality and this exclusive
attention, how shall we grow and increase in worth, and how shall the
Brotherhood of Man be brought about?
We may think that each friend has his own place and is unique,
satisfying some especial part of our nature; each to be kept separate in
his niche, the saint to whom we turn for sympathy in those matters
wherein we have vowed him our confidences. We may satisfy our
consciences by giving to each the same number of candles, and by a
religious celebration of each Saint's day, keeping the calendar of our
devotions independent and exclusive, but this method does not make for
growth. It is our duty to help knit Society together, to modify
extremes, to transmit and transform affection. Surely there is love
enough for all, and the more we give the more we shall have to give to
our friends, whether they be old or new.
Friendship is, however, a matter of caste. With just as many as share
our point of view or can understand it, who laugh at the things we laugh
at, who are tempted by our temptations and sin our sins, can we have a
divine fellowship. Through these to others outside of our ken, through
friend to friend's friend the tie passes that shall bind the whole world
together at last.
Our set of friends is a solar system, a cluster of planets, that,
revolving about us, moves with the same trend through space and time.
Each member of the fraternity has its own aphelion and perihelion,
occultation and transit. Whether they are visible or invisible, we must
be sure that each in due season will return to the same relative
position and exert the same attraction, answering the law of gravity
that in true friendship keeps them in their orbits about us. But the
circles interlace, and in that is the possibility of keeping the unity
of our constellation of friends. Were the same comrades to accompany us
unceasingly we could not develop. There must be an intricate
complication of actions and reactions, and we must be affected by each
in turn and in combination.
What is a parting from a friend but a departure in quest of new
experience? Each fresh meeting, therefore, should be the sharing of the
fruits that both have gathered, that each may profit by the
contribution. If you tell me of a book you have read, I am amused and
profited by the knowledge you bring me; shall I not be grateful to you
for what you bring from an interesting person? If every new friend
contributes to our development and enriches us by his personality, not
only are we the better for it ourselves, but more worth while to our
friends. It is not you as you are whom I love best, but you as you
shall be when, in due time, you have come to your perfect stature;
wherefore I shall not begrudge the loan of you to those who have set you
on the way.
Though we may hold one friend paramount over all others, and admit him
to every phase of intimacy, there are minor confidences that are often
most possible with an entire stranger. Were we to meet a man of the
Sixteenth Century, what could we not tell such an impersonal questioner!
What would we care for the little mortifications that come between even
the best of friends? We could confess faults and embarrassments without
shame, we could share every hope and doubt without fear, for he would
regard us without bias or prejudice. He could scourge us with no whip
of conventional morality, and he would be able to judge any action of
itself, hampered by no code or creed.
We had a game once, my sister and I, in which we agreed to look at each
other suddenly, newly, as if we had never met before. Frequently we
were able to catch a novel phase of character, and our sub-conscious
self, freed from the servitude of custom, bounded in a new emotion.
Could we, in this way, at times regard our friends, how much we might
learn! We fall into the habit of seeing what we look for, and we compel
old friends to live up to the preconception. Why not look at them,
occasionally, as strangers to be studied and learned? There are two
variable quantities in the equation of friendship, Yourself and Myself.
Nor is our relation itself fixed; it is alive and changing from hour to
hour. There is no such thing as an unalterable friendship, for both
parties to the affair are moving at different speeds, first one and then
the other ahead, giving a hand to be helped on and reaching back to
assist. Might we not, indeed, reverse the previous experiment and
regard any stranger as a blood relative, assuming a fraternity of
interest? We need only to be honest and kind.
By these two processes we may keep old friends and make new ones; and
our conscience shall acquit us of disloyalty. When one enlarges one's
establishment, one does not decrease either the wages or the duties of
the servants before employed. The new members of the household have new
functions. More is given and more is received. But it is not so much
that one must give more as that one should give wisely and economically,
we must be generous in quality rather than in quantity; for, though
there is love enough to go round for all, there is not time enough for
most of us. We must clasp hands, give the message and pass on, trusting
to meet again on the journey, and come to the same inn at nightfall.
*A Defense of Slang*
Could Shakespeare come to Chicago and listen curiously to "the man in
the street," he would find himself more at home than in London. In the
mouths of messenger boys and clerks he would find the English language
used with all the freedom of unexpected metaphor and the plastic,
suggestive diction that was the privilege of the Elizabethan dramatists;
he would say, no doubt, that he had found a nation of poets. There was
hardly any such thing as slang in his day, for no graphic trope was too
virile or uncommon for acceptance, if its meaning were patent. His own
heroes (and heroines, too, for Rosalind's talk was as forcible in
figures of speech as any modern American's) often spoke what corresponds
to the slang of today.
The word, indeed, needs precise definition, before we condemn all
unconventional talk with opprobrium. Slang has been called "poetry in
the rough," and it is not all coarse or vulgar. There is a prosaic as
well as a poetic license. The man in the street calls a charming girl,
for instance, a "daisy." Surely this is not inelegant, and such a
reference will be understood a century hence without a foot-note.
Slang, to prove adjuvant to our speech, which is growing more and more
rigid and conventional, should be terse; it should make for force and
clarity, without any sacrifice of beauty. Still, manner should befit
matter; the American "dude" is, perhaps, no more unpleasant a word than
the emasculated fop it described. The English "bounder" is too useful
an appellation to do without in London, and, were that meretricious
creature of pretence and fancy waistcoat more common in the United
States, the term would be welcomed to American slang with enthusiasm.
New York, alas, has already produced "cads," but no Yankee school would
ever tolerate a "fag."
The mere substitution of a single synonymous term, however, is not
characteristic of American slang. Your Chicago messenger boy coins
metaphorical phrases with the facility of a primitive savage. A figure
of speech once started and come into popular acceptance changes from day
to day by paraphrase, and, so long as a trace of the original
significance is apparent, the personal variation is comprehensible, not
only to the masses, but generally to those whose purism eschews the use
of the common talk. Thus, to give "the glassy eye" became the
colloquial equivalent of receiving a cool reception. The man on the
street, inventive and jocose, does not stop at this.
At his caprice it becomes giving "the frozen face" or even "the marble
heart." In the same way one may hear a garrulous person spoken of as
"talking to beat the band," an obvious metaphor; or, later, "to beat the
cars."
The only parallel to this in England is the "rhyming slang" of the
costers, and the thieves' "patter." There a railway guard may be
facetiously termed a "Christmas card," and then abbreviated to "card"
alone, thence to permutations not easily traced. But English slang is,
for the most part, confined to the "masses," and is an incomprehensible
jargon to all else save those who make an especial study of the subject.
One may sit behind a bus driver from the Bank to Fulham, and understand
hardly a sentence of his colloquies and gibes at the passing fraternity,
but though the language of the trolley conductor of Chicago is as racy
and spirited, it needs less translation. The American will, it is true,
be enigmatic at times; you must put two and two together. You must
reduce his trope to its lowest terms, but common sense will simplify it.
It is not an empirical, arbitrary wit depending upon a music-hall song
for its origin. I was riding on a Broadway car one day when a
semi-intoxicated individual got on, and muttered unintelligibly, "Put me
off at Brphclwknd Street, please." I turned to the conductor and asked,
"What did he want?" The official smiled. "You can search me!" he said,
in denial of any possession of apprehension.
Slang in America, then, is expression on trial; if it fits a hitherto
unfurnished want it achieves a certain acceptance. But it is a frothy
compound, and the bubbles break when the necessity of the hour is past,
so that much of it is evanescent. Some of the older inventions remain,
such as "bunco" and "lynch" and "chestnut," but whole phrases lose their
snap like uncorked champagne, though they give their stimulant at the
proper timely moment. Like the eggs of the codfish, one survives and
matures, while a million perish. The "observed of all observers"
(Ophelia's delicate slang, observe) was, yesterday, in New York "the
main Guy," a term whose appositeness would be easily understood in
London, where the fall of the Gunpowder Plot is still celebrated.
Later, in Chicago, according to George Ade, a modern authority, it
became the "main squeeze," and another permutation rendered the phrase
useless. It is this facility of change that makes most slang spoil in
crossing the Atlantic. On the other side, English slang is of so
esoteric an origin and reference, that no Yankee can translate or adopt
it. It is drop-forged and rigid, an empiric use of words to express
humour. What Englishman, indeed, could trace the derivation of "balmy
on the crumpet" as meaning what the American would term "dotty" or
"bug-house," unless he was actually present at the music hall where it
was first invented?
We have at least three native languages to learn--the colloquial, the
literary prose, and the separate vocabulary of poetry. In America slang
makes a fourth, and it has come to be that we feel it as incongruous to
use slang on the printed page as it is to use "said he" or "she replied
with a smile" in conversation, and, except for a few poets, such words
as "haply," "welkin," or "beauteous" in prose. Yet Stevenson himself,
the purist who avoids foreign words, uses Scotch which nearly approaches
slang, for there is little difference between words of an unwritten
dialect and slang, such as "scrannel" and "widdershins"; while Wilkie
Collins writes "wyte," "wanion," "kittle," "gar," and "collop" in with
English sentences, as doubtless many questionable words of today will be
honoured in the future.
Slang, the illegitimate sister of Poetry, makes with her a common cause
against the utilitarian economy of Prose. Both stand for lavish
luxuriance in trope and involution, for floriation and adornment of
thought. It is their boast to make two words grow where but one grew
before. Both garb themselves in metaphor, and the only complaint of the
captious can be that whereas Poetry follows the accepted style, Slang
dresses her thought to suit herself in fantastic and bizarre
caprices--that her whims are unstable and too often in bad taste.
But this odium given to slang by superficial minds is undeserved. In
other days, before the language was crystallized into the verbiage and
idiom of the doctrinaire, prose, too, was untrammelled. A cursory
glance at the Elizabethan poets discloses a kinship with the rebellious
fancies of our modern common colloquial talk. For gargarism, scarab,
quodling, puckfist, scroyle, foist, pumpion, trindle-tale, comrogue,
pigsbones, and ding-dong, we may now read chump, scab, chaw, yap, fake,
bloke, pal, bad-actor, and so on. "She's a delicate dab-chick!" says
Ben Jonson; "she had all the component parts of a peach," says George
Ade.
It will be seen that slang has two characteristics--humour and force.
Brevity is not always the soul of wit, for today we find amusement in
the euphuisms that, in the sixteenth century were taken in all
seriousness. The circumlocutions will drop speedily out of use, but the
more apt and adequate neologisms tend to improve literary style. For
every hundred times slang attributes a new meaning to an old word, it
creates once or twice a new word for an old meaning. Many hybrids will
grow, some flower and a few seed. So it is with slang.
There is a "gentleman's slang," as Thackeray said, and there is the
impossible kind; but of the bulk of the American product, the worst to
be said of it usually is that it is homely and extravagant. None the
less is it a picturesque element that spices the language with
enthusiasm. It is antiseptic and prevents the decay of virility.
Literary style is but an individual, glorified slang. It is not
impossible for the artist; it went to its extreme in the abandon of Ben
Jonson, Webster, and Beaumont and Fletcher, but, as your Cockney would
say, "It does take a bit of doin'" nowadays.
*The Charms of Imperfection*
For a long time I have held a stubborn belief that I should admire and
aim at perfection. I admitted its impossibility, of course; I
attributed my friends' failure to achieve it as a charming evidence of
their humanity, but it seemed to me to be a thing most properly to be
desired. And yet, upon thinking it over, I was often astonished by the
discovery that most of my delights were caused by a divergence from this
ideal. "A sweete disorder in the dress kindleth in cloathes a
wantonness!"
Now, is this because I am naturally perverse, and enjoy the bizarre, the
unique and the grotesque? Is it because of my frailty that I take a
dear delight in signs of our common humanity, in the petty faults and
foibles of the world? Or is it because I have misinterpreted this ideal
of perfection, and have thought it necessary or proper to worship a
conventional criterion? Celestine and I have been puckering our brows
for a week over the problem!