"Roughly speaking," says a writer in a recent issue of the _New
Statesman_, "no man using or wearing a monocle should be appointed to
any public post in the United States. Believe me, nothing short of
his fine simplicity and intellectual integrity would have enabled Mr.
William Archer to 'get away with it.'" The warning occurs in an
admirable article dealing with the disastrous way in which official
England is usually represented in America. It is a subject of first
importance, on which I am in entire agreement with the writer, and
about which I could say much from personal knowledge. But the
eyeglass will serve. You can see the whole landscape surveyed by the
writer through the Englishman's eyeglass.
And, first, let me clear away the suggestion about my good friend
William Archer. It is true he carries an eyeglass, and I have seen
him on occasion use it to examine documents. But he does not wear an
eyeglass, and he does wear spectacles. Neither in fact nor in spirit
can he be included in the ranks of the Eyeglass Englishman. Nor,
indeed, can all those who do wear an eyeglass be included in that
category. I have known men who succeeded in wearing an eyeglass
without offence. I have even known a lady who wore one so naturally
and with such a suggestion of unconsciousness that you yourself were
almost unconscious that she wore it.
But, generally speaking, an eyeglass is an ostentation. It is an
ostentation because it is so much more natural, easy and unaffected
to wear spectacles, which serve precisely the same uses. You put a
pair of spectacles on your nose and forget all about them. And the
world forgets all about them. You cannot do that with an eyeglass.
The world cannot do that with an eyeglass. Spectacles convey no
implications, carry no comment; but an eyeglass is as declaratory as
a Union Jack. It is a public announcement of ourselves. It is an
intimation to the world that we have arrived. And the world takes
note of the fact. When it thinks of Mr. Austen Chamberlain, it
thinks of an eyeglass as inevitably as when it thinks of Nelson it
thinks of an armless sleeve, or when it thinks of Richard III. it
thinks of a hump-back. An eyeglass is as troublesome as a feverish
baby. It is an occupation. It is almost a career. It is always
dropping out and being reaffixed with an ugly contortion of the
muscles of the eye-socket. And if, by long practice, it is kept in
position without contortion, you are insensibly kept wondering how
the feat is performed and waiting for the laws of Nature to operate.
In a word, a monocle calls attention to itself. It is a calculated
affectation. It is an advertisement that we are someone in
particular, and that we expect to be observed. It is as much a
symbol of class consciousness as the red tie of the Socialist, and it
is much less pleasing, for the red tie is an assertion of human
equality, while the monocle sets up a claim to social exclusiveness.
The wearer of the red tie wants everybody to wear red ties. The more
red ties he sees, the happier he feels. If everybody wore red ties
it would be very heaven. Surely the millennium is at hand, he would
say. He would feel the spasm that Hyndman felt when he noticed that
all the porters of a certain station were wearing red ties. "See,"
he said to John Burns, "see the red ties! the social revolution is on
the march." "Nothing of the sort," said Burns. "It's a part of the
station uniform." Hyndman's face fell, for he did really want to see
everybody wearing the same coloured tie as himself. But if one
morning Lord Dundreary (late of the Guards) saw the whole of
Piccadilly bursting out into monocles, every policeman wearing a
monocle, and every cabman wearing a monocle, and everybody in the
buses wearing a monocle, he would feel that the pillars of the
firmament were tumbling down. He would take off his monocle and
grind it under his heel. He must belong to an exclusive set or cease
to find life livable.
The philosophy of the eyeglass is explained in the familiar story of
Disraeli and Chamberlain. When the famous Israelite, who was an
artifice from the curl plastered on his forehead to the sole of his
foot, saw through his eyeglass the terrible Radical Mayor of
Birmingham enter the House for the first time, he turned to his
neighbour and said: "He wears his eyeglass _like a gentleman_." He
was satisfied. There was no reason to fear the Mayor of Birmingham.
He was "one of us." No one would say that So-and-So "wears his
spectacles like a gentleman" any more than he would say that he
"wears his hat" (or his boots) "like a gentleman." What Disraeli
meant was that Chamberlain could do an exceptional thing with the air
of one who was doing an ordinary thing. He knew how to be
conspicuous without being unhappy. He wore the badge of the superior
person as if he had forgotten it was there. He wore it as though
Nature had decorated him at birth with the Order of the Eyeglass. He
was a Perfect Gentleman.
There is nothing wrong in being a Perfect Gentleman. It is a very
proper ambition; but we ought not to label ourselves Perfect
Gentlemen. We ought to be content to leave the world to discover
that we are Perfect Gentlemen, and not proclaim the fact by means of
a pane of glass hung perilously in the right eye. For, according to
the practice of the best circles, it should always be in the right
eye. The left eye may be as blind as a bat, but it would never do to
wear a pane of glass there. If you do that you do not know the first
law of the Cult of the Eyeglass. None of the best people wear the
monocle in the left eye. It is like eating peas with your knife, or
tucking your serviette in at your collar, as the Germans (who are
most Imperfect Gentlemen) do, instead of wearing it on your knees,
where it will not get in the way of anything that happens to fall.
It is impossible to think of greatness in the terms of the eyeglass.
Shakespeare himself could hardly survive so limiting and belittling a
circumstance. Try to think of Milton, in the days before blindness
had come upon him, sitting at Cromwell's elbow with an eyeglass in
his right eye. Imagine Gladstone or Newman wearing eyeglasses. The
mind rejects the image as a sort of sacrilege. Indeed one may almost
say that the measure of greatness is the extent of the humiliation
which an eyeglass would inflict upon the subject. And, yet again--so
dangerous is it to generalise--there are rare cases in which an
eyeglass seems the fitting property of the man. Joseph Conrad was
such a case. There was in him a haughty aloofness from the drama
that he observed with such cold and dispassionate understanding that
his eyeglass had a certain significance that gave it warrant. He did
not wear it "like a gentleman." He wore it like a being of another
creation.
I do not know whether we invented the monocle, nor do I know whether
it is a peculiarly English institution; I fancy it is. In any case,
it is the universal attribute of the stage Englishman abroad, and in
America, where an eyeglass would be an offence against the unwritten
law of the republic, it symbolises all those manners of the superior
person whose export abroad, and especially to the United States, does
our interests much harm. The warning of the writer in the _New
Statesman_ is badly needed. Let us keep the Eyeglass Englishman
(whether he wears an eyeglass or not) at home, where we are used to
him, and where he can do no mischief. After all, he does not
represent us. He is only one in ten thousand of us. Why should he
be chosen to make us misunderstood by people who dislike the idea of
social caste and all its appurtenances?