of themselves, their wives, their sons, their daughters, their houses,
their horses--everything!--but to decry all methods of achievement not
their own, and all successes not won by their methods. These are the
self-made men who bring into disrepute all the grandeur and glorious
achievement of their kind. Why must they spoil it? I implore them to
assume a virtue if they have it not. I beg them, with all their
getting, to get understanding. And if they will not open their eyes
and see the anguish they are causing, if they cannot detect the fixed
smile of polite endurance on the tired faces of their patient women
friends, there will come a day, and we can already see its faint
glimmering in the East, when we shall not care whether they are
self-made, and we could even live through it if they were not made at
all.
THE DYSPEPTIC
The dyspeptic generally wants to tell you all about it. That is a bore
to begin with; for nobody in the world wants to hear anybody in the
world tell all about anything in the world. Oh, those wearisome,
breathless people, who insist upon giving you the tiresome details of
insipid trivialities! There is no escape from them; they are
everywhere. They are to be found on farms, in mining-camps, in women's
clubs, in churches, jails, and lunatic asylums, and the nearest
approach to a release from them is to be fashionable, for in society
nobody ever is allowed to finish a sentence.
This sort of a bore can only be explained on the microbe theory. None
other can account for its universality. You can carry contagion of it
in your clothes and inoculate a person of weak mental constitution,
who is of a build to take anything, until, in a fortnight, he or she
will be a hopeless slave to the tell-all-about-everything habit. There
is nothing like the pleasing swiftness of some of our modern diseases
about it--such as heart failure, which nips you off painlessly. It is
rather like the old-fashioned New England consumption, which gives you
a hectic flush and an irritating hack, but which you can thrive on for
fifty years and then die of something else.
I never heard of a yacht which did not carry at least one of this
particular breed of bores upon every trip. I never heard of a
private-car party which was free from it. Or, if you do not carry them
with you, you meet them on the way, and they ruin the sunset for the
whole party.
Something ought to be done about it. There ought to be a poll-tax on
bores. Mothers ought to train their children to avoid lying and boring
people with equal earnestness. Infirmaries should be established for
the purpose of making the stupid interesting, or classes organized on
"How to be Brief," or on "The Art of Relating Salient Points," or on
"The Best Method of Skipping the Unessentials in Conversation."
_I_ would go, for one.
I quite envy a man who is an acknowledged bore. He is so free from
responsibility. _He_ does not care that the conversation dies every
time he shows his face. He is used to it. It is nothing to him that
clever men and women ache audibly in his presence. _He_ has no
reputation to lose. The hostess is not a friend of his, for whom he
feels that he must exert himself. A bore _has_ no friends. He is a
social leech.
It implies, first of all, a superb conceit to think anybody wishes one
to tell all about anything, but conceit is a natural attribute--a twin
brother of its sister, vanity--and everybody has it to a greater or
less degree. Indeed, the cleverest man I know--quite the cleverest--is
one who always panders to this particular foible because he recognizes
its universality. He has a country-house, which is always full of
guests, with a great many girls among them. Every afternoon, when he
drives out from town, his first sentence is, "Now come, children, and
tell me all about everything. Who has been here, and what they said,
and what you thought, and everything that has happened, including all
that is going to happen. Don't skip a word."
See the base flattery of that! Is it any wonder that his house is
always full? What bores he would be responsible for making if we were
stupid enough to do as he asks! The chief reason people do not is that
ten people cannot tell all they know about everything, even if they
want to. He is only furnished with two ears.
The dyspeptic is one who makes the most valiant effort to try. His
dyspepsia is the most important issue of the world with him, and he
_will_ talk about it. He cannot keep still and let other people enjoy
their sound digestion and healthful sleep. He will not even let other
people eat in peace. When he refuses a dish at table he must needs
tell you why--just as if you cared!
"Have some coffee, Mr. Bore?"
"No, I thank you, Madame Sans-Gene. I like coffee, but it doesn't like
me!"
Irritating, maddeningly reiterated words--the trade-mark of the
dyspeptic bore! I feel like saying, "I agree with the coffee. _I_
don't like you either!"
A dyspeptic disagrees with me as religiously as if I had eaten him.
No wonder a man is ill who never thinks or talks of anything but the
seat of his ailment, for talk about it he will, and tell you that he
cannot eat hot breads or pastry or griddle-cakes or waffles. And if
any of those adorable things which your soul loves are on the table,
he will sit and watch you eat them, with his hand on his own pulse,
and will entertain you with cheerful statements of how he would be
feeling if _he_ were eating any of the deadly poisons, until it nearly
gives you indigestion to hear him describe it.
I dare say I know plenty of women dyspeptics, as long as dyspepsia is
said to be our national ailment, but if I do I never hear them talk
about it.
Of course every woman knows that a sick man is sicker than a thousand
sick women, each of whom is twice as sick as he is. We all know that
he can groan louder and roll his eyes higher and keep more people
flying about, and all this with just a plain pain, than his wife would
do with seven fatal ailments. Then to hear him tell about it, after he
has recovered, is to imagine that he is Lazarus over again, and that
the day of miracles has returned, that he ever lived to tell the tale.
All this refers to an acute attack. But when his trouble is chronic,
and it has to do, like dyspepsia, with a man's eating!--you cannot
escape. He _will_ tell you all about it.
In the first place, dyspepsia is such a refined and lady-like trouble.
It has no disgusting details. You can refer to it at all times without
fear of nauseating your hearers. In the second place, you can count on
nearly half of your hearers having it too, as dyspepsia is almost as
catching as Christian Science.
Carlyle was the most famous of dyspeptics. But magnificent as he was
in his growling, I fancy it is more bearable to read about it than it
was for that adorable wife of his to hear him talk about it. How well
we can imagine her feelings when she wrote, "The amount of bile that
he brings home is awfully grand."
But one forgives much of his dyspeptic talk, and even allows the
mantle of one's Christian charity to cover the sins of lesser
bile-cursed men to hear how he sums up the subject:
"With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much. But what, in
these dull, unimaginative days, are the terrors of conscience to the
diseases of the liver? Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build
our stronghold. There, brandishing our frying-pan as censer, let us
offer sweet incense to the devil and live at ease on the fat things he
has provided for his elect."
I really do feel sorry for dyspeptics when I read a thing like that. I
am not heartless. It must be a sad thing not to be able to eat lobster
and ice-cream together, and to have to say "No" to broiled mushrooms,
and not to dare to eat Welsh-rarebits after the theatre, and to have
to lock up your chafing-dish. But I do say this: unless a man can talk
of his trouble as cleverly as Carlyle--and some of the choice
dyspeptics I know can almost do that--I want them not to talk at all.
If they suffer, let them do it in silence. If they die, let them die
entertainingly, or else, I say, don't die in public.
I never see a dyspeptic with his little pair of silver scales on the
table, weighing out two ounces of meat, or one ounce of bread, and
looking like a death's-head at a feast, and talking like a
grave-digger with Yorick's skull for a theme, that I do not think of
this:
"Fantastic tricks enough man has played in his time; has fancied
himself to be most things, even down to an animated heap of glass; but
to fancy himself a dead iron balance for weighing pains and pleasures
on was reserved for this, his latter era."
THE TOO-ACCURATE MAN
Women often complain that men in society will not return measure for
measure in conversation, but stalk about dumb and unanswering, leaving
women gasping from the fatigue of entertaining them.
But I am on the side of the men. I always am. They are a misjudged and
maligned set. I approve of men keeping silence when they have nothing
to say. It shows that they recognize their limitations and refuse to
rush in where angels fear to tread.
Is not a wise silence sometimes to be preferred to the wisest speech?
Is there not often a finer eloquence in an answering silence than the
cleverest words could express?
A man who talks constantly has a thousand ways always at hand in which
to make a fool of himself. A silent man has but one, and even then
there are always those who insist upon thinking that he is silent
because of his wisdom, and not from lack of it, although Eliza Leslie
says, "We cannot help thinking that when a head is full of ideas some
of them must involuntarily ooze out."
But as a stimulus to conversation, an intelligently silent man is as
instantaneous in his effect as music or eating. Men have become famous
as conversationists who only sat and looked admiringly at vivacious
women. It is a rare accomplishment, that of wise silence. It is more
of a delicate compliment, more condensed and boiled-down flattery,
more scent of incense than the most fulsome speech. And if one's
victim is rather a voluble talker, with a reputation for wit, a man
need never rack his brains beforehand, wondering what to say, or how
he can keep up with her. Let him listen to her, with his metaphorical
mouth open in wrapt admiration, and she is his.
Silence is a weapon. It is a powerful corrective when used against a
silent person, who then sees himself as others see him. It is a
defence, used against the indiscreet, and in the hands of wise men it
is a suit of armor. Silence is never dangerous, unless, like a gun, in
the hands of a fool. How, then, can women complain of silent men,
unless they mean fools, and if they do, why not say so, and fortify
their drawing-rooms with music-boxes or magic lanterns?
But anything so negatively unhappy as silence is the least of one's
bores. One is seldom annoyed by the persistence of a silent man, for
silence often means shyness; therefore it is in our power to curtail
his usefulness. But, on the other hand, take a type of the talkative
man, the literal, too-accurate man, who insists upon finishing his
sentences, and who will stop to dot his i's and to cross his t's, and
whose dates are of more moment than his soul's salvation--can anything
be done for _him_?
"Avoid giving invitations to bores," says a clever woman, "they will
come without."
Alas, how true! The too-accurate man is ubiquitous. If you hear of
him, and refuse to meet him, it is only to find that he has married
your best friend, whom worlds could not bribe you to give up. If you
weed him out of your acquaintance, it is only to realize that he was
born into your relationship a generation ago, before you could prevent
it. Sometimes he is your father, sometimes your brother. Both of
these, however, can be lived down. But occasionally you discover that,
in a moment of frenzy, you have married him! Heaven help you then, for
"marriage stays with one like a murder!"
Imagine living all one's life with a man who relates thus the trivial
incident of having walked with a friend up Broadway last Thursday
afternoon, when he met two little boys about ten years old who asked
him to buy a paper:
"Last week--Thursday, I think it was, though perhaps it was Friday,
or, maybe, Saturday. Let me see: when did I leave my office early? It
must have been Thursday, because Friday I stayed later than usual.
Yes, it _was_ Thursday. It was about four o'clock, perhaps a little
later--a quarter after four, or maybe half-past, but I hardly think it
could have been as late as that. I think it was nearer four than
half-past. Anyway, I was walking up Broadway with a man by the name of
Bigelow. Bigelow? Bigelow? Was that his name? It commenced with B, and
had two syllables. Boswell? Blackwell? Blayney? What _was_ that
fellow's name? I never can tell a story unless I get the man's name
right. Bilton? Bashforth? Buckby? No, not Buckby, but that sounds like
it. Buckley? That's it. That was his name! I knew I'd get it. Well, I
was walking up Broadway with Buckley, and at about Thirty-fourth
Street--Wait a moment--_was_ it Thirty-fourth Street? It couldn't have
been that far up. About Thirty-second Street, I think. I don't quite
remember whether we had passed the Imperial or not. But it was within
a block of it, anyway, when we met two little boys about ten years
old--perhaps one was a little older; one looked about ten, and the
other about eleven, or perhaps even twelve, although I think ten would
come nearer to it--and they asked us in a tone between a whine and a
cry--the word whimper more nearly describes it--if we would buy either
a _Sun_ or a _World_--I've forgotten which."
Delectable as honesty is in a bank clerk, or would be in a lawyer, one
yearns for a little less accuracy in the moral makeup of the
too-accurate man; for a little of the celestial leaven of exaggeration
in the dusty dryness of his dead-level garrulousness. What difference
does it make whether the Revolutionary War took place before or after
the discovery of America, as long as you make your war anecdote
interesting? Who cares whether Napoleon or Wellington came out ahead
at Waterloo, as long as your listener is kept awake by your recital?
I related a sprightly incident only last night about a watch which
Francis the Second gave to Mary Stuart, only with my usual airy touch
I said Francis the Second gave it to Marie Antoinette! What difference
does it make? They were both Marys, and they are both dead.
A most unpleasant old party corrected me, and added: "Francis died
about two hundred years before Marie Antoinette was born."
"Then all the more of a compliment that he should have given her the
watch!" I said. And I fancy I had him there.
That is the sort of man who interrupts his wife's dinner-stories all
the way through with, "1812, my dear"; "Ouida, not Emerson"; "Herod,
not Homer"; until _I_ shouldn't be surprised to see her throw a plate
at his head. Oh, isn't it fine that one does not dare to do all the
things one feels like doing in society?
There is only one way to get even with the too-accurate man, and that
is, when he has finished his most exciting story, to say, "And then
what happened next?"
Accuracy is almost fatal to a flow of spirits. If one is obliged to
weigh one's words, one may live to be called a worthy old soul, but
one will not be in demand at dinner-parties.
The too-accurate man need not pride himself upon his honesty above his
fellow-men. Oftenest he is to be found paying lithe of mint, anise,
and cumin, and neglecting the weightier matters of the law--justice,
mercy, and truth. He strains at a gnat and swallows a camel. He is not
more trustworthy than the man whose conversation is embellished with
hyperbole, because he at least has the wit to discriminate, and the
too-accurate man is only stupid.
In essentials, the man who decorates his conversation with mild but
pleasing patterns of that style of statement made famous by one
Ananias, is to be depended upon quite as surely as the man who takes
all the sunshine from the day, and leads one's thoughts to dwell on
high, by spending ten minutes trying to recall whether he dropped that
stone on his foot before or after dinner. He, and not your own evil
nature, should be responsible for your instinctive wish that he had
happened to be toying with a bowlder instead of a small stone which
could only mutilate.
The painful accuracy which makes some men such deadly bores is a form
of monomania. It is the same sort of trouble which afflicts a
kleptomaniac. She will steal the veriest trash, just so she can be
stealing. He hoards the most useless trifles until his mind is nothing
but a garret filled with isolated bits of rubbish that nobody wants to
hear, unless one has an essay to write; and even then it is easier to
consult the encyclopaedia.
I never believe a statement made by a too-accurate man one bit more
quickly than one made by a genial, entertaining diner-out. If it were
on the subject of timetables, just between ourselves, I should take
the trouble to verify both.
THE IRRESISTIBLE MAN
To other men, the irresistible man too often means the man who
publicly ogles women. That is because men can _see_ him. But to women,
what we can see forms but a small portion of our lives. We hear more
than we see, and feel more than we hear. George Eliot says: "The best
of us go about well wadded with stupidity, otherwise we would die of
the roar that lies on the other side of silence."
But most men have to see things, and they can always see the ogling
man, and he always makes them perfectly furious. Queer, isn't it, when
the Simon Tappertits of this life are the least of the men who bore
us? In fact, I never should have thought of him if some man had not
spoken of him. And while I occasionally have been honored by the
exertions of one of these insects to attract my attention, thereby
proving that I am a woman, I can honestly say that I never remember
seeing one. Women who are capable of being really _bored_ never even
see such men; any more than if you were being roasted alive you would
care if a hairpin pulled.
It is a mistake to confound the irresistible man with the fool.
Neither is he stupid. Very often he is a man of no small amount of
brain. He is, of course, always conceited, and generally, though not
always, handsome. I am not describing the soft, sapient, pretty man
who lisps, nor the weak-kneed young gentleman with pink cheeks who
sings tenor. Far worse. The irresistible man, as _we_ know him, is
often a man who is doing a man's work in the world, and doing it well.
He is frequently a man of character, but through that character runs
this strange, irritating thread of conceit, which blinds our eyes to
whatever of real worth may be within, because of his exasperatingly
confident exterior.
We should brush him aside as carelessly as if he were a fly should
there be nothing to him worth hating. But the maddening part of it to
us is that the irresistible man is worth saving, only he will not be
saved. He thinks he is perfect as he is. If he could get our point of
view and let some woman take a hand at him, she might efface his
irresistibleness and make a man of him. But no, the irresistible man
is in this world to give points--not take them.
A queer thing about this particular type of the irresistible man is
that he nearly always has grown up in a small town and has only come
to the city because his village got too small for his talents. That of
itself explains his whole attitude towards the world. Having probably
been the "show pupil" at school, having taken prizes and ranked first
among his fellows until he was twenty-one, he brings that confident
attitude with him and plants himself in the heart of the great city,
like Ajax defying the lightning, without the thought that changed
environments might demand change of conduct as well as change in
clothes.
Doubtless the whole town helped to spoil him. Doubtless he has heard
all his life that the town was too small for him, and that a man like
himself ought to go to the city, where there would be a market for his
talents. Doubtless he has conquered the hearts of all the village
maidens; therefore he expects the same arts to win among city girls.
This system of easy victory and of yearning for other worlds to
conquer, instead of making him fit himself capably for a larger field,
has, on account of this absurd fault of irresistibleness, only made
him superficial. His crudeness is, to the uninitiated, almost pitiful.
Having never been obliged to work for pre-eminence, he descries
exertion, and never admits that he has to try hard to win anything.
His cheap little accomplishments of singing--badly--possibly even of
reciting dialect with realistic effects, he is accustomed to say he
"just picked up." I often have thought that he must have picked them
up after somebody else had thrown them away. But they have been
efficacious in his town, and in a larger field, with foemen more
worthy of his steel, they are intended to enslave.
The irresistible man is too pitiful to laugh at with any degree of
comfort. The pathos of the situation is almost too apparent. That is
one reason why he is allowed to go on as he is. It is why no one has
the heart to try to correct him. What _can_ you say to a man whose
confidence in his power to please you is such that at parting he says:
"I cannot spare you another evening this week, but I'll come next
Thursday if I can. Don't expect me, however, until I let you know, and
don't be disappointed if you find that I can't come, after all."
To be sure, you have not asked him to repeat his visit at all. To be
sure, you have nearly died during this call which is just over. But
what are you going to do? We have a white bulldog whose confident
attitude towards the world is quite like that of the irresistible man.
Jack blunders in where nobody wants him, and puts his great, heavy paw
on our best gowns, and scratches at the door when we want to sleep,
and gets under our feet when we are trying to catch a train, and makes
a nuisance of himself generally. But he is so sure that we love him
that we haven't the heart to turn him out-of-doors. We simply endure
him, because he is a dumb brute who is so used to being petted that
everybody tolerates him, and nobody tries to improve him or teach him
better manners.
Confidence is a beautiful thing. But it is also one of the most
delicate of attributes, and requires the daintiest handling. The man
who is confident with women must be very sure of a personal magnetism,
or of sufficient merit to insure success, otherwise his confidence
will prove the flattest of failures. The only difference between the
irresistible man who bores us to death and the successful man who is
so fascinating that he cannot come too often, is that one has
confidence with nothing to base it on, and the other bases his
confidence on fact.
Women are not looking for flaws in men. They are only too anxious to
make the best of sorry specimens, and shut their eyes to faults, and
to coax virtues into prominence. Men have nothing to complain of in
the way women in society treat them. They get better than they deserve
and much better than they give. So all they will have to do to win a
better opinion will be to deserve it, and, if they make never so
slight an advance, they will see that they are met more than half-way
by even the most captious critics of their acquaintance.
Adaptability is a heaven-sent gift. It is like the straw used in
packing china. It not only saves jarring, but it prevents worse
disasters, and without it a man is only safe when he is alone. The
moment he comes into smart contact with his fellow-beings there is a
crash, and the assembled company have a vision of broken fragments of
humanity, which might have remained whole and suffered no more injury
than a possible nick had the combatants been padded with adaptability.
The irresistible man is the man who thinks he can get through the
world without it. The irresistible man is the one who is so perfect in
his own estimation that he needs no change. He is beyond human help.
THE STUPID MAN
His opposite, the clever man, said to me yesterday: "You know, to be
actually interested is as likely to make one grateful as anything in
this world, unless it be a realization of the kindness of Fate in
sparing us the perpetual society of fools."
The perpetual society of fools! Think of it, and then revel, you
women, in the thought that we are only bored occasionally--once a
week, say, or once a day, or once every two hours, taking our bores as
we do ill-flavored medicine. It never occurred to me before I heard
that phrase that life held anything more wearisome than to be bored
occasionally.