The other day I went into a hatter's to get my hat ironed. It had been
ruffled by the weather, and I had a reason for wishing it to look as new
and glossy as possible. And as I waited and watched the process of
polishing, the hatter talked to me on the subject that really interested
him--that is, the subject of hats and heads.
"Yes," said he, in reply to some remark I had made; "there's a wonderful
difference in the shape of 'eads _and_ the size. Now your 'ead is what you
may call an ord'nary 'ead. I mean to say," he added, no doubt seeing a
shadow of disappointment pass across my ordinary face, "I mean to say, it
ain't what you would call extry-ord'nary. But there's some 'eads--well,
look at that 'at there. It belongs to a gentleman with a wonderful
funny-shaped 'ead, long and narrer and full of nobbles--'stror'nary 'ead 'e
'as. And as for sizes, it's wonderful what a difference there is. I do a
lot of trade with lawyers, and it's astonishing the size of their 'eads.
You'd be surprised. I suppose it's the amount of thinking they have to do
that makes their 'eads swell. Now that 'at there belongs to Mr. ------
(mentioning the name of a famous lawyer), wonderful big 'ead 'e
'as--7-1/2--that's what 'e takes, and there's lots of 'em takes over 7.
"It seems to me," he went on, "that the size of the 'ead is according to
the occupation. Now I used to be in a seaport town, and I used to serve a
lot of ships' captains. 'Stror'nary the 'eads they have. I suppose it's the
anxiety and worry they get, thinking about the tides and the winds and the
icebergs and things...."
I went out of the shop with my ord'nary 'ead, conscious of the fact that I
had made a poor impression on the hatter. To him I was only a 6-7/8 size,
and consequently a person of no consequence. I should have liked to point
out to him that it is not always the big heads that have the jewel in them.
Of course, it is true that great men often have big heads. Bismarck's size
was 7-1/4, so was Gladstone's, so was Campbell-Bannerman's. But on the
other hand, Byron had a small head, and a very small brain. And didn't
Goethe say that Byron was the finest brain that Europe had produced since
Shakespeare? I should not agree in ordinary circumstances, but as a person
with a smallish head, I am prepared in this connection to take Goethe's
word on the subject. As Holmes points out, it is not the size of the brain
but its convolutions that are important (I think, by the way, that Holmes
had a small head). Now I should have liked to tell the hatter that though
my head was small I had strong reason to believe that the convolutions of
my brain were quite top-hole.
I did not do so and I only recall the incident now because it shows how we
all get in the way of looking at life through our own particular peep-hole.
Here is a man who sees all the world through the size of its hats. He
reverences Jones because he takes 7-1/2; he dismisses Smith as of no
account because he only takes 6-3/4. In some degree, we all have this
restricted professional vision. The tailor runs his eye over your clothes
and reckons you up according to the cut of your garments and the degree of
shininess they display. You are to him simply a clothes-peg and your merit
is in exact ratio to the clothes you carry. The bootmaker looks at your
boots and takes your intellectual, social and financial measurement from
their quality and condition. If you are down-at-the-heel, the glossy
condition of your hat will not alter his opinion about you. The hat does
not come in his range of vision. It is not a part of his criteria.
It is so with the dentist. He judges all the world by its teeth. One look
in your mouth and he has settled and immovable convictions about your
character, your habits, your physical condition, your position, and your
mental attributes. He touches a nerve and you wince. "Ah," says he to
himself, "this man takes too much alcohol and tobacco and tea and coffee."
He sees the teeth are irregular. "Poor fellow," he says, "how badly he was
brought up!" He observes that the teeth are neglected. "A careless fellow,"
he says. "Spends his money on follies and neglects his family I'll be
bound." And by the time he has finished with you he feels that he could
write your biography simply from the evidence of your teeth. And I daresay
it would be as true as most biographies--and as false.
In the same way, the business man looks at life through the keyhole of his
counting-house. The world to him is an "emporium," and he judges his
neighbour by the size of his plate glass. And so with the financier. When
one of the Rothschilds heard that a friend of his who had died had left
only a million of money he remarked: "Dear me, dear me! I thought he was
quite well off." His life had been a failure, because he had only put a
million by for a rainy day. Thackeray expresses the idea perfectly in
_Vanity Fair_:--
"You see," said old Osborne to George, "what comes of merit and industry
and judicious speculations and that. Look at me and my banker's account.
Look at your poor grandfather Sedley and his failure. And yet he was a
better man than I was, this day twenty years--a better man I should say by
twenty thousand pounds."
I fancy I, too, have my professional way of looking at things, and am
disposed to judge men, not by what they do but by the skill they have in
the use of words. And I know that when an artist comes into my house he
"sizes me up" from the pictures on the wall, just as when the upholsterer
comes he "places" me according to the style of the chairs and the quality
of the carpet, or as when the gourmet comes he judges by the cooking and
the wine. If you give him champagne he reverences you; if hock he puts you
among the commonplace.
In short, we all go through life wearing spectacles coloured by our own
tastes, our own calling, and our own prejudices, measuring our neighbours
by our own tape-measure, summing them up according to our own private
arithmetic. We see subjectively, not objectively; what we are capable of
seeing, not what there is to be seen. It is not wonderful that we make so
many bad guesses at that prismatic thing, the truth.