The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Perfect Gentleman

The Project Gutenberg eBook ofThe Perfect GentlemanThis ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.Title: The Perfect GentlemanAuthor: Ralph BergengrenRelease date: November 15, 2007 [eBook #23481]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Stephen Blundell and theOnline Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN ***

This ebook is for the use of anyone anywhere in the United States and most other parts of the world at no cost and with almost no restrictions whatsoever. You may copy it, give it away or re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included with this ebook or online atwww.gutenberg.org. If you are not located in the United States, you will have to check the laws of the country where you are located before using this eBook.

Title: The Perfect GentlemanAuthor: Ralph BergengrenRelease date: November 15, 2007 [eBook #23481]Language: EnglishCredits: Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Stephen Blundell and theOnline Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

Title: The Perfect Gentleman

Author: Ralph Bergengren

Release date: November 15, 2007 [eBook #23481]

Language: English

Credits: Produced by Audrey Longhurst, Stephen Blundell and theOnline Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE PERFECT GENTLEMAN ***

The Atlantic Monthly PressBoston

The author gratefully acknowledges his indebtedness to The Century Co. for permission to reprint "Oh, Shining Shoes!"

The Perfect Gentleman1As a Man Dresses14In the Chair28Oh, Shining Shoes!43On Making Calls55The Lier in Bed67To Bore or Not to Bore79Where Toils the Tailor93Shaving Thoughts106Oh, The Afternoon Tea!122

Somewherein the back of every man's mind there dwells a strange wistful desire to be thought a Perfect Gentleman. And this is much to his credit, for the Perfect Gentleman, as thus wistfully contemplated, is a high ideal of human behavior, although, in the narrower but honest admiration of many, he is also a Perfect Ass. Thus, indeed, he comes down the centuries—a sort of Siamese Twins, each miraculously visible only to its own admirers; a worthy personage proceeding at one end of the connecting cartilage, and a popinjay prancing at the other. Emerson was, and described, one twin when he wrote, 'The gentleman is a man of truth, lord of his own actions, and expressing that lordship in his behavior;not in any manner dependent or servile, either on persons, or opinions, or possessions.' Walter Pater, had Leonardo painted a Perfect Gentleman's portrait instead of a Perfect Lady's, might have described the other: 'The presence that thus rose so strangely beside the tea-table is expressive of what in the ways of a thousand years women had come to desire. His is the head upon which "all the ends of the world have come," and the eyelids are a little weary. He is older than the tea things among which he sits.' Many have admired, but few have tried to imitate, the Perfect Gentleman of Emerson's definition; yet few there are who have not felt the wistful desire for resemblance. But the other is more objective: his clothes, his manners, and his habits are easy to imitate.

Of this Perfect Gentleman in the eighteenth century I recently discoveredfossil remains in theGentleman's Pocket Library(Boston and Philadelphia, 1794), from which any literary savant may restore the original. All in one volume, the Library is a compilation for Perfect Gentlemen in the shell, especially helpful with its chapter on the 'Principles of Politeness'; and many an honest but foolish youth went about, I dare say, with this treasure distending his pocket, bravely hoping to become a Perfect Gentleman by sheer diligence of spare-time study. If by chance this earnest student met an acquaintance who had recently become engaged, he would remember the 'distinguishing diction that marks the man of fashion,' and would 'advance with warmth and cheerfulness, and perhaps squeezing him by the hand' (oh, horror!) 'would say, "Believe me, my dear sir, I have scarce words to express the joy I feel, uponyour happy alliance with such and such a family, etc."' Of which distinguishing diction, 'believeme' is now all that is left.

If, however, he knew that the approaching victim had been lately bereaved, he would 'advance slower, and with a peculiar composure of voice and countenance, begin his compliments of condolence with, "I hope, sir, you will do me the justice to be persuaded, that I am not insensible to your unhappiness, that I take part in your distress, and shall ever be affected whenyouare so."'

In lighter mood this still imperfect Perfect Gentleman would never allow himself to laugh, knowing, on the word of his constant pocket-companion, that laughter is the 'sure sign of a weak mind, and the manner in which low-bred men express their silly joy, at sillythings, and they call it being merry.' Betteralways, if necessary, the peculiar composure of polite sensibility to the suffering of properly introduced acquaintances. When he went out, he would be careful to 'walk well, wear his hat well, move his head properly, and his arms gracefully'; and I for one sympathize with the low-breds if they found him a merry spectacle; when he went in, he would remember pertinently that 'a well-bred man is known by his manner of sitting.' 'Easy in every position,' say the Principles of Politeness, 'instead of lolling or lounging as he sits, he leans with elegance, and by varying his attitudes, shows that he has been used to good company.' Good company, one judges, must have inclined to be rather acrobatic.

Now, in the seventeen-nineties there were doubtless purchasers for theGentleman'sPocket Library: the desire to become a Perfect Gentleman (like this one) by home study evidently existed. But, although I am probably the only person who has read that instructive book for a very long time, it remains to-day the latest complete work which any young man wishing to become a Perfect Gentleman can find to study. Is it possible, I ask myself, that none but burglars any longer entertain this ambition? I can hardly believe it. Yet the fact stands out that, in an age truly remarkable for its opportunities for self-improvement, there is nothing later than 1794 to which I can commend a crude but determined inquirer. To my profound astonishment I find that the Correspondence-School system offers no course; to my despair I search the magazines for graphic illustration of an Obvious Society Leader confidingto an Obvious Scrubwoman: 'Six months agomyhusband was no more a Perfect Gentleman thanyours, but one day I persuaded him tomark that coupon, and all our social prominence andéclatwe owe to that school.'

One may say, indeed, that here is something which cannot conceivably be described as a job; but all the more does it seem, logically, that the correspondence schools must be daily creating candidates for what naturally would be a post-graduate course. One would imagine that a mere announcement would be sufficient, and that from all the financial and industrial centres of the country students would come flocking back to college in the next mail.

Be a Perfect GentlemanIn the Bank—at the Board of Directors—putting through that New Railroadin Alaska—wherever you are and whatever you are doing to drag down the Big Money—wouldn't you feel more at ease if youknewyou were behaving like a Perfect Gentleman?We will teach YOU how.

Be a Perfect Gentleman

In the Bank—at the Board of Directors—putting through that New Railroadin Alaska—wherever you are and whatever you are doing to drag down the Big Money—wouldn't you feel more at ease if youknewyou were behaving like a Perfect Gentleman?

We will teach YOU how.

Some fifty odd years ago Mr. George H. Calvert (whom I am pained to find recorded in theDictionary of American Authorsas one who 'published a great number of volumes of verse that was never mistaken for poetry by any reader') wrote a small book about gentlemen, fortunately in prose and not meant for beginners, in which he cited Bayard, Sir Philip Sidney, Charles Lamb, Brutus, St. Paul, and Socrates as notable examples. Perfect Gentlemen all, as Emerson would agree, I question if any of them ever gave a moment's thought to his manner of sitting; yet any two, sitting together, would have recognizedeach other as Perfect Gentlemen at once and thought no more about it.

These are the standard, true to Emerson's definition; and yet such shining examples need not discourage the rest of us. The qualities that made them gentlemen are not necessarily the qualities that made them famous. One need not be as polished as Sidney, but one must not scratch. One need not have a mind like Socrates: a gentleman may be reasonably perfect,—and surely this is not asking too much,—with mind enough to follow this essay. Brutus gained nothing as a gentleman by assisting at the assassination of Cæsar (who was no more a gentleman, by the way, in Mr. Calvert's opinion, than was Mr. Calvert a poet in that of theDictionary of Authors).

As for Fame, it is quite sufficient—and this only out of gentlemanly considerationfor the convenience of others—for a Perfect Gentleman to have his name printed in the Telephone Directory. And in this higher definition I go so far as to think that the man is rare who is not sometimes a Perfect Gentleman, and equally uncommon who never is anything else. Adam I hail a Perfect Gentleman when, seeing what his wife had done, he bit back the bitter words he might have said, and then—he too—took a bite of the apple: but oh! how far he fell immediately afterward, when he stammered his pitiable explanation that the woman tempted him and he did eat! Bayard, Sir Philip Sidney, Charles Lamb, St. Paul, or Socrates would have insisted, and stuck to it, thathe bit it first.

I have so far left out of consideration—as for that matter did the author and editor of thePocket Library(not wishingto discourage students)—a qualification essential to the Perfect Gentleman in the eighteenth century. He must have had—what no book could give him—an ancestor who knew how to sit. Men there were whose social status was visibly signified by the abbreviation 'Gent.' appended to their surnames. But already this was becoming a vermiform appendix, and the nineteenth century did away with it. This handsome abbreviation created an invidious distinction between citizens which democracy refused longer to countenance; and, much as a Lenin would destroy the value of money in Russia by printing countless rouble notes without financial backing, so democracy destroyed the distinctive value of the word 'gentleman' by applying it indiscriminately to the entire male population of the United States.

The gentleman continues in various degrees of perfection. There is no other name for him, but one hears it rarely; yet the shining virtue of democratization is that it has produced a kind of tacit agreement with Chaucer's Parson that 'to have pride in the gentrie of the bodie is right gret folie; for oft-time the gentrie of the bodie benimeth the gentrie of the soul; and also we be all of one fader and one moder.' And although there are few men nowadays who would insist that theyaregentlemen, there is probably no man living in the United States who would admit that he isn't.

And so I now see that my bright dream of a Correspondence-School post-graduate course cannot be realized. No bank president, no corporation director, electrical engineer, advertising expert, architect, or other distinguishedalumnus would confess himself no gentleman bymarking that coupon. The suggestion would be an insult, were it affectionately made by the good old president of his Alma Mater in a personal letter. A few decorative cards, to be hung up in the office, might perhaps be printed and mailed at graduation.

A batheverydayIs the Gentleman's way.

Don't break the Ten Commandments—Moses meant YOU!

Dress Well—Behave Better.

A Perfect Gentleman has a Good Heart,a Good Head, a Good Wardrobe,and a Good Conscience.

Atsome time or other, I dare say, it is common experience for a man to feel indignant at the necessity of dressing himself. He wakes in the morning. Refreshed with sleep, ready and eager for his daily tasks and pleasures, he is just about to leap out of bed when the thought confronts him that he must put on his clothes. His leap is postponed indefinitely, and he gets up with customary reluctance. One after another, twelve articles—eleven, if two are joined in union one and inseparable—must be buttoned, tied, laced, and possibly safety-pinned to his person: a routine business, dull, wearisome with repetition. His face and hands must be washed, his hair and teeth brushed: many, indeed, will perform all overwhat Keats, thinking of the ocean eternally washing the land, has called a 'priestlike task of pure ablution'; but others, faithful to tradition and Saturday night, will dodge this as wasteful. Downstairs in summer is his hat; in winter, his hat, his overcoat, his muffler, and, if the weather compels, his galoshes and perhaps his ear-muffs or ear-bobs. Last thing of all, the Perfect Gentleman will put on his walking-stick; somewhere in this routine he will have shaved and powdered, buckled his wrist-watch, and adjusted his spats.

When we think of the shortness of life, and how, even so, we might improve our minds by study between getting up and breakfast, dressing, as educators are beginning to say of the long summer vacation, seems a sheer 'wastage of education'; yet the plain truth is that we wouldn't get up. Better, if wecan, tothinkwhile we dress, pausing to jot down our worth-while thoughts on a handy tablet. Once, I remember,—and perhaps the pleasant custom continues,—a lady might modestly express her kindly feeling for a gentleman (and her shy, half-humorous recognition of the difference between them) by giving him shaving-paper; why not a somewhat similar tablet, to record his dressing-thoughts?

'Clothes,' so wrote Master Thomas Fuller,—and likely enough the idea occurred to him some morning while getting into his hose and doublet,—'ought to be our remembrancers of our lost innocency.' And so they are; for Adam must have bounded from bed to breakfast with an innocency that nowadays we can only envy.

Yet, in sober earnest, the first useful thing that ever this naked fellow set hishand to was the making of his own apron. The world, as we know and love it, began—your pardon, Mr. Kipling, but I cannot help it—when

Cross-legged our Father Adam sat and fastened them one by one,Till, leaf by leaf, with loving care he got his apron done;The first new suit the world had seen, and mightily pleased with it,Till the Devil chuckled behind the Tree, 'It's pretty, but will it fit?'

From that historic moment everything a man does has been preceded by dressing, and almost immediately the process lost its convenient simplicity. Not since Adam's apron has any complete garment, or practical suit of clothes, been devised—except for sea-bathing—that a busy man could slip on in the morning and off again at night. All our indignation to the contrary, we prefer the complicated and difficult: we enjoyour buttons; we are withheld only by our queer sex-pride from wearing garments that button up in the back—indeed, on what we frankly call our 'best clothes,' wehave the buttonsthough wedare not buttonwith them. The one costume that a man could slip on at night and off again in the morning has never, if he could help it, been worn in general society, and is now outmoded by a pretty little coat and pantaloons of soft material and becoming color. We come undressed; but behold! thousands of years before we were born, it was decided that we must be dressed as soon as possible afterward, and clothes were made for us while it was yet in doubt whether we would be a little gentleman or a little lady. And so a man's first clothes are cunningly fashioned to do for either; worse still,—a crying indignity that, oh, thank Heaven, he cannotremember in maturity,—he is forcibly valeted by a woman, very likely young and attractive, to whom he has never been formally introduced.

But with this nameless, speechless, and almost invertebrate thing that he once was—this little kicking Maeterlinck (if I may so call it) between the known and the unknown worlds—the mature self-dresser will hardly concern himself. Rather, it may be, will he contemplate the amazing revolution which, in hardly more than a quarter-century, has reversed public opinion, and created a free nation which, no longer regarding a best-dresser with fine democratic contempt, now seeks, with fine democratic unanimity, to be a best-dresser itself. Or perhaps, smiling, he will recall Dr. Jaeger, that brave and lonely spirit who sought to persuade us that no other garment is so comfortable, so hygienic,so convenient, and so becoming to all figures, as the union suit—and that it should be worn externally, with certain modifications to avoid arrest. His photograph, thus attired, is stamped on memory: a sensible, bearded gentleman, inclining to stoutness, comfortably dressed in eye-glasses and a modified union suit. And then, almost at the same moment, the Clothing Industry, perhaps inspired by the doctor's courage and informed by his failure, started the revolution, since crowned by critical opinion, in a Sunday newspaper, that 'The American man, considering him in all the classes that constitute American society, is to-day the best-dressed, best-kept man in the world.'

Forty or fifty years ago no newspaper could plausibly have made that statement, and, if it had, its office would probably have been wrecked by a mobof insulted citizens; but the Clothing Industry knew us better than Dr. Jaeger, better even than we knew ourselves. Its ideal picture of a handsome, snappy young fellow, madly enjoying himself in exquisitely fitting, ready-to-wear clothes, stirred imaginations that had been cold and unresponsive to the doctor's photograph. We admired the doctor for his courage, but we admired the handsome, snappy young fellow for his looks; nay, more, we jumped in multitudes to the conclusion, which has since been partly borne out, that ready-to-wear clothes would make us all look like him. And so, in all the classes that constitute American society (which I take to include everybody who wears a collar), the art of dressing, formerly restricted to the few, became popular with the many. Other important and necessary industries—the hatters, theshoemakers, the shirtmakers, the cravatters, the hosiers, even the makers of underwear—hurried out of hiding; and soon, whoever had eyes to look could study that handsome, snappy young fellow in every stage of costume,—for the soap-makers also saw their opportunity,—from the bath up.

The tailor survived, thanks probably to the inevitable presence of Doubting Thomas in any new movement; but he, too, has at last seen the light. I read quite recently his announcement that in 1919 men's clothes would be 'sprightly without conspicuousness; dashing without verging on extremes; youthful in temperament and inspirational.' Some of us, it appears, remain self-conscious and a little afraid to snap; and there the tailor catches us with his cunningly conceived 'sprightly without conspicuousness.' Unlike thevers-librepoetess who would fain 'go naked in the street and walk unclothed into people's parlors,'—leaving, one imagines, an idle but deeply interested gathering on the sidewalk,—we are timid about extremes. We wish to dash—but within reasonable limits. Nor, without forcing the note, would we willingly miss an opportunity to inspire others, or commit the affectation of concealing a still youthful temperament.

A thought for the tablet:As a man dresses, so he is.

Thirty or forty years ago there were born, and lived in a popular magazine, two gentlemen-heroes whose perfect friendship was unmarred by rivalry because, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, they were of such different but equally engaging types of manly beauty. I forget whether they married sisters, but they live on in the memory asornamental symbols of a vanished past—a day when fiction-writers impressed it, on their readers with every means at their command, that a hero was well-dressed, well-washed, and well-groomed. Such details have become unnecessary, and grumpy stand-patters no longer contemptuously mutter, 'Soap! Soap!' when a hero comes down to breakfast. Some of our older politicians, to be sure, still wear a standard costume of Prince Albert coat, pants (for so one must call them) that bag at the knee, and an impersonal kind of black necktie, sleeping, I dare say, in what used jocularly to be called a 'nightie'; but our younger leaders go appropriately clad, to the eye, in exquisitely fitting, ready-to-wear clothes. So, too, does the Correspondence-School graduate, rising like an escaped balloon from his once precarious place among the untrained workersto the comfortable security of general manager. Here and there, an echo of the past, persists the pretence that men are superior to any but practical considerations in respect to clothing; but if this were so, I need hardly point out that more would dress like Dr. Jaeger, and few waste precious moments fussing over the selection of prettily colored ribbons to wear round their necks.

Fortunately we need no valets, and a democracy of best-dressers is neither more nor less democratic than one of shirt-sleeves: the important thing in both cases is that the great majority of citizens all look alike. The alarm-clock awakens us, less politely than a James or Joseph, but we need never suspect it of uncomplimentary mental reservations, and neither its appetite nor its morals cause us uneasiness. Fellow-citizens of Greek extraction maintain parlorswhere we may sit, like so many statues on the Parthenon, while they polish our shoes. In all large cities are quiet retreats where it is quite conventional, and evendégagé, for the most Perfect Gentleman to wait in what still remains to him, while an obliging fellow creature swiftly presses his trousers; or, lacking this convenient retreat, there are shrewd inventions that crease while we sleep. Hangers, simulating our own breadth of shoulders, wear our coats and preserve their shape. Wooden feet, simulating our own honest trotters, wear our shoes and keep them from wrinkling. No valet could do more. And as for laying out our clothes, has not the kind Clothing Industry provided handy manuals of instruction? With their assistance any man can lay out the garments proper to any function, be it a morning dig in the garden, a noon weddingat the White House, or (if you can conceive it) a midnight supper with Mrs. Carrie Nation.

And yet—sometimes, that indignation we feel at having to dress ourselves in the morning, we feel again at having to undress ourselves at night. Then indeed are our clothes a remembrancer of our lost innocency. We think only of Adam going to bed. We forget that, properly speaking, poor innocent Adam had no bed to go to. And we forget also that in all the joys of Eden was none more innocent than ours when we have just put on a new suit.

Aboutonce in so often a man must go to the barber for what, with contemptuous brevity, is called a haircut. He must sit in a big chair, a voluminous bib (prettily decorated with polka dots) tucked in round his neck, and let another human being cut his hair for him. His head, with all its internal mystery and wealth of thought, becomes for the time being a mere poll, worth two dollars a year to the tax-assessor: an irregularly shaped object, between a summer squash and a cantaloupe, with too much hair on it, as very likely several friends have advised him. His identity vanishes.

As a rule, the less he now says or thinks about his head, the better: he has given it to the barber, and the barberwill do as he pleases with it. It is only when the man is little and is brought in by his mother, that the job will be done according to instructions; and this is because the man's mother is in a position to see the back of his head. Also because the weakest woman under such circumstances has strong convictions. When the man is older the barber will sometimes allow him to see the haircut cleverly reflected in two mirrors; but not one man in a thousand—nay, in ten thousand—would dare express himself as dissatisfied. After all, what does he know of haircuts, he who is no barber? Women feel differently; and I know of one man who, returning home with a new haircut, was compelled to turn round again and take what his wife called his 'poor' head to another barber by whom the haircut was more happily finished. But that was exceptional.And it happened to that man but once.

The very word 'haircut' is objectionable. It snips like the scissors. Yet it describes the operation more honestly than the substitute 'trim,' a euphemism that indicates a jaunty habit of dropping in frequently at the barber's and so keeping the hair perpetually at just the length that is most becoming. For most men, although the knowledge must be gathered by keen, patient observation and never by honest confession, there is a period, lasting about a week, when the length of their hair is admirable. But it comes between haircuts. The haircut itself is never satisfactory. If his hair was too long before (and on this point he has the evidence of unprejudiced witnesses), it is too short now. It must grow steadily—count on it for that!—until for abrief period it is 'just right,' æsthetically suited to the contour of his face and the cut of his features, and beginning already imperceptibly to grow too long again.

Soon this growth becomes visible, and the man begins to worry. 'I must go to the barber,' he says in a harassed way. 'I must get a haircut.' But the days pass. It is always to-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow. When he goes, he goes suddenly.

There is something within us, probably our immortal soul, that postpones a haircut; and yet in the end our immortal souls have little to do with the actual process. It is impossible to conceive of one immortal soul cutting another immortal soul's hair. My own soul, I am sure, has never entered a barber's shop. It stops and waits for me at the portal. Probably it converses,on subjects remote from our bodily consciousness, with the immortal souls of barbers, patiently waiting until the barbers finish their morning's work and come out to lunch.

Even during the haircut our hair is still growing, never stopping, never at rest, never in a hurry: it grows while we sleep, as was proved by Rip Van Winkle. And yet perhaps sometimes it is in a hurry; perhaps that is why it falls out. In rare cases the contagion of speed spreads; the last hair hurries after all the others; the man is emancipated from dependence on barbers. I know a barber who is in this independent condition himself (for the barber can no more cut his own hair than the rest of us) and yet sells his customers a preparation warranted to keep them from attaining it: a seeming anomaly which can be explained only on the groundthat business is business. To escape the haircut one must be quite without hair that one cannot see and reach; and herein possibly is the reason for a fashion which has often perplexed students of the Norman Conquest. The Norman soldiery wore no hair on the backs of their heads; and each brave fellow could sit down in front of his polished shield and cut his own hair without much trouble. But the scheme had a weakness; the back of the head had to be shaved; and the fashion doubtless went out because, after all, nothing was gained by it. One simply turned over on one's face in the barber's chair instead of sitting up straight.

Fortunately we begin having a haircut when we are too young to think, and when also the process is sugar-coated by the knowledge that we are losing our curls. Then habit accustomsus to it. Yet it is significant that men of refinement seek the barber in secluded places, basements of hotels for choice, where they can be seen only by barbers and by other refined men having or about to have haircuts; and that men of less refinement submit to the operation where every passer-by can stare in and see them, bibs round their necks and their shorn locks lying in pathetic little heaps on the floor. There is a barber's shop of this kind in Boston where one of the barbers, having no head to play with, plays on a cornet, doubtless to the further distress of his immortal soul peeping in through the window. But this is unusual even in the city that is known far and wide as the home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

I remember a barber—he was the only one available in a small town—whocut my left ear. The deed distressed him, and he told me a story. It was a pretty little cut, he said,—filling it with alum,—and reminded him of another gentleman whose left ear he had nipped in identically the same place. He had done his best with alum and apology, as he was now doing. Two months later the gentleman came in again. 'And by golly!' said the barber, with a kind of wonder at his own cleverness, 'if I didn't nip him again in just the same place!'

A man can shave himself. The Armless Wonder does it in the Dime Museum. Byron did it, and composed poetry during the operation; although, as I have recently seen scientifically explained, the facility of composition was not due to the act of shaving but to the normal activity of the human mind at that time in the morning. Here,therefore, a man can refuse the offices of the barber. If he wishes to make one of a half-dozen apparently inanimate figures, their faces covered with soap, and their noses used as convenient handles to turn first one cheek and then the other—that is his own lookout. But human ingenuity has yet to invent a 'safety barber's shears.' It has tried. A near genius once invented an apparatus—a kind of helmet with multitudinous little scissors inside it—which he hopefully believed would solve the problem; but what became of him and his invention I have not heard. Perhaps he tried it himself and slunk, defeated, into a deeper obscurity. Perhaps he committed suicide; for one can easily imagine that a man who thought he had found a way to cut his own hair and then found that he hadn't, would be thrown into a suicidal depression.There is the possibility that he succeeded in cutting his own hair, and was immediately 'put away,' by his sensitive family where nobody could see him but the hardened attendants. The important fact is that the invention never got on the market. Until some other investigator succeeds to more practical purpose, the rest of us must go periodically to the barber. We must put on the bib—

Here, however, there is at least an opportunity of selection. There are bibs with arms, and bibs without arms. And there is a certain amount of satisfaction in being able to see our own hands, carefully holding the newspaper or periodical wherewith we pretend that we are still intelligent human beings. And here again are distinctions. The patrons of my own favored barber's shop have arms to their bibs and pretendto be deeply interested in theIllustrated London News. The patrons of the barber's shop where I lost part of my ear—I cannot see the place, but those whom I take into my confidence tell me that it has long since grown again—had no sleeves to their bibs, but nevertheless managed awkwardly to hold thePolice Gazette. And this opportunity to hold thePolice Gazettewithout attracting attention becomes a pleasant feature of this type of barber's shop: I, for example, found it easier—until my ear was cut—to forget my position in the examination of this journal than in the examination of theIllustrated London News. The pictures, strictly speaking, are not so good, either artistically or morally, but there is a tang about them, an I-do-not-know-what. And it is always wisest to focus attention on some such extraneous interest.Otherwise you may get to looking in the mirror.

Do not do that.

For one thing, there is the impulse to cry out, 'Stop! Stop! Don't cut it all off!

'Oh, barber, spare that hair!Leave some upon my brow!For months it's sheltered me!And I'll protect it now!

'Oh, please! P-l-e-a-s-e!—'

These exclamations annoy a barber, rouse a demon of fury in him. He reaches for a machine called 'clippers.' Tell him how to cut hair, will you! A little more and he'll shave your head—and not only half-way either, like the Norman soldiery at the time of the Conquest! Even if you are able to restrain this impulse, clenching your bib in your hands and perhaps dropping or tearing theIllustrated London News, the mirrorgives you strange, morbid reflections. You recognize your face, but your head seems somehow separate, balanced on a kind of polka-dotted mountain with two hands holding theIllustrated London News. You are afraid momentarily that the barber will lift it off and go away with it.

Then is the time to read furiously the weekly contribution of G. K. Chesterton. But your mind reverts to a story you have been reading about how the Tulululu islanders, a savage but ingenious people, preserve the heads of their enemies so that the faces are much smaller but otherwise quite recognizable. You find yourself looking keenly at the barber to discover any possible trace of Tulululu ancestry.

And what is he going to get now? Akris? No, a paint-brush. Is he going to paint you? And if so—what color?The question of color becomes strangely important, as if it made any real difference. Green? Red? Purple? Blue? No, he uses the brush dry, tickling your forehead, tickling your ears, tickling your nose, tickling you under the chin and down the back of your neck. After the serious business of the haircut, a barber must have some relaxation.

There is one point on which you are independent: you will not have the bay rum; you are a teetotaller. You say so in a weak voice which nevertheless has some adamantine quality that impresses him. He humors you; or perhaps your preference appeals to his sense of business economy.

He takes off your bib.

From a row of chairs a man leaps to his feet, anxious to givehishead to the barber. A boy hastily sweeps up the hair that was yours—already as remotefrom you as if it had belonged to the man who is always waiting, and whose name is Next. Oh, it is horrible—horrible—horrible!

Ina democracy it is fitting that a man should sit on a throne to have his shoes polished, or, to use a brighter, gayer word, shined. We are all kings, and this happy conceit of popular government is nicely symbolized by being, for these shining moments, so many kings together, each on his similar throne and with a slave at his feet. The democratic idea suffers a little from the difficulty of realizing that the slave is also a king, yet gains a little from the fair custom of the livelier monarchs of turning from left foot to right and from right to left, so that, within human limits, neither shoe shall be undemocratically shined first.

Nor is it uncommon for the kings on the thrones to be symbolically and inexpensivelyserved by yet other sovereign servants. Newspapers in hand, they receive the reports of their lord high chancellors, digest the social gossip of their realm, review its crimes, politics, discoveries, and inventions, and are entertained by their jesters, who, I have it on the authority of a current advertisement, all democratically smoke the same kind of tobacco. 'You know 'em all, the great fun-makers of the daily press, agile-brained and nimble-witted, creators of world-famed characters who put laughter into life. Such live, virile humans as theymusthave a live, virile pipe-smoke.' There are, to be sure, some who find in this agile-brained and nimble-witted mirth an element of profound melancholy; it seems often a debased coin of humor, which rings false on the counter of intelligence; yet even at its worst it is far better than many of thewaggeries that once stirred laughter in mediæval monarchs. The thought renders them bearable, these live, virile humans, who only a few centuries ago would have been too handicapped by their refinement to compete successfully with contemporary humorists.

But there are a good many of us, possessors of patience, self-control, and a sponge in a bottle, who rarely enjoy this royal prerogative. We shine our own shoes. Alone, and, if one may argue from the particular to the general, simply dressed in the intermediate costume, more or less becoming, that is between getting up and going out, we wear a shoe on our left hand, and with the other manipulate the helpful sponge. Sometimes, too anxious, it polka-dots our white garments, sometimes the floor; it is safe only in the bottle, and the wisest shiner will perhaps approach the job asan Adamite, bestriding, like a colossus, a wide-spread newspaper, and taking a bath afterward. Or it may be that instead of the bottle we have a little tin box, wedded to its cover,—how often have we not exclaimed between clenched teeth, 'What man hath joined together man can pull asunder!'—and containing a kind of black mud, which we apply with an unfortunate rag or with a brush appropriately called the 'dauber.' Having daubed, we polish, breathing our precious breath on the luminous surface for even greater luminosity. The time is passing when we performed this task of pure lustration, as Keats might have called it, in the cellar or the back hall, more fully, but not completely, dressed, coatless, our waistcoats rakishly unbuttoned or vulgarly upstairs, our innocent trousers hanging on their gallowses, our shoes on our feet, and our physicalactivity not altogether unlike that demanded by a home-exerciser to reduce the abdomen. Men of girth have been advised to saw wood; I wonder that they never have been advised to shine their own shoes—twenty-five times in the morning and twenty-five times just before going to bed.

My own observation, although not continuous enough to have scientific value, leads me to think that stout men are the more inveterate patrons of the shoe-blacking parlor,—Cæsar should have run one,—and that the present popularity of the sponge in a bottle may derive from superfluous girth. Invented as a dainty toilet accessory for women, and at first regarded by men as effeminate, it is easy to see how insidiously the sponge in a bottle would have attracted a stout husband accustomed to shine his own shoes in the earlier contortionistmanner. By degrees, first one stout husband and then another, men took to the bottle; the curse of effeminacy was lifted; the habit grew on men of all sizes. It was not a perfect method,—it blacked too many other things besides shoes, and provided an undesirable plaything for baby,—but it was a step forward. There was a refinement, aje ne sais quoi, an 'easier way,' about this sponge in a bottle; and, perhaps more than all, a delusive promise that the stuff would dry shiny without friction, which appealed to the imagination.

Then began to disappear a household familiar—that upholstered, deceptive, utilitarian hassock kind of thing which, when opened, revealed an iron foot-rest, a box of blacking,—I will notsayhow some moistened that blacking, but you and I, gentle reader, brought water in a crystal glass from the kitchen,—andan ingenious tool which combined the offices of dauber and shiner, so that one never knew how to put it away right side up. This tool still exists, an honest, good-sized brush carrying a round baby brush pickaback; and I dare say an occasional old-fashioned gentleman shines his shoes with it; but in the broader sense of that pernicious and descriptive phrase it is no longer used 'by the best people.' Of late, I am told by shopkeepers, the tin box with the pervicacious cover is becoming popular; but I remain true to my sponge in a bottle: for, unlike the leopard, I am able to change my spots.

Looking along the ages from the vantage of a throne in the shoe-blacking parlor, it is a matter of pleased wonder to observe what the mind has found to do with the feet; nor is the late invention of shoe-polish (hardly earlier than theDeclaration of Independence) the least surprising item. For the greater part of his journey man has gone about his businesses in unshined footwear, beginning, it would appear, with a pair of foot-bags, or foot-purses, each containing a valuable foot, and tied round the ankle. Thus we see him, far down the vista of time, a tiny figure stopping on his way to tie up his shoe-strings. Captivated with form and color, he exhausted his invention in shapes and materials before ever he thought of polish: he cut his toes square; he cut his toes so long and pointed that he must needs tie them to his knee to keep from falling over them; he wore soles without uppers,—alas! poor devil, how often in all ages has he approximated wearing uppers without soles!—and he went in for top-boots splendidly belegged and coquettishly beautified with what, had he beena lady, he might have described as an insertion of lace. At last came the boot-blacking parlor, late nineteenth century, commercial, practical, convenient, and an important factor in civic aesthetics. Not that the parlor is beautiful in itself. It is a cave without architectural pretensions, but it accomplishes unwittingly an important mission: it removes from public view the man who is having his shoes shined.

You know him, as the advertisement says of the live, virile humans whomusthave the live, virile pipe-smoke; but happily you know him nowadays chiefly by effort of memory. Yet only a little while ago kindly, well-intentioned men thought nothing of having their shoes shined in the full glare of the sun. The man having his shoes shined was a common spectacle. He sat or stood where anybody might see him, almostas immobile as a cigar-store Indian and much less decorative, with a peripatetic shoeblack busy at his feet. His standing attitude was a little like Washington crossing the Delaware; and when he sat down, he was not wholly unlike the picture of Jupiter in Mr. Bulfinch's well-knownAge of Fable. He had his shoes shined on the sidewalk, congesting traffic; he had them shined in the park, with the birds singing; wherever he had them shined, he was as lacking in self-consciousness as a baby sucking its thumb. Peripatetic shoeblacks pursued pedestrians, and no sensitive gentleman was safe from them merely because he had carefully and well shined his own shoes before he came out. But how rarely nowadays do we see this peripatetic shoeblack! Soon he will be as extinct as the buffalo, and the shoe-blacking parlor is his Buffalo Bill.

In the shoe-blacking parlor we are all tarred with the same brush, all daubed with the same dauber; we have nothing, as the rather enigmatical phrase goes,onone another. Indeed, we hardly look at one another, and are as remote as strangers sitting side by side in a theatre. Individually, in a steady, subconscious way, I think we are all wondering how we are going to get down when the time comes. One will hop, like a great sparrow; another will turn round and descend backward; another will come down with an absent-minded little wave of the foot, as if he were quite used to having his shoes shined and already thinking of more serious business; another—but this is sheer nervousness and lack ofsavoir-faire—will step off desperately, as if into an abyss, and come down with a thump. Sometimes, but rarely, a man will fall off. It is a throne—and perhapsthis is true of all thrones—from which no altogether self-satisfactory descent is possible; and we all know it, sitting behind our newspapers, or staring down on decadent Greece shining at our feet, or examining with curious, furtive glances those calendars the feminine beauty of which seems peculiar to shoe-blacking parlors, and has sometimes led us to wonder whether the late Mr. Comstock ever had his shoes shined.

And now, behold! the slave-king at my feet has found a long, narrow strip of linen, not, I fear, antiseptic, but otherwise suggestive of a preparedness course in first aid to the injured. He breathes on my shoes (O unhygienic shoeblack!), dulling them to make them brighter with his strip of linen. It is my notice to abdicate; he turns down the bottoms of my trousers. I do not know how I get down from the throne.

I knowa boy who dislikes to make calls. Making a call, he says, is 'just sitting on a chair.'

I have had the same feeling, although I had never defined it so nicely. One 'just sits on a chair'—precariously, yet with an odd sense of unhappy security, of having grown to and become part of that chair, as if one dreaded to fall off, yet strongly suspected that any real effort to get up and go away would bring the chair up and away with him. He is, so to speak, like a barnacle on a rock in an ocean of conversation. He may exhibit unbarnacle-like activity, cross and uncross his legs, fold and unfold his arms, twiddle his useful fingers, incline his tired head this way and that to relieve the strain on his neck, assume(like an actor) expressions of interest, amusement, surprise, pleasure, or what not. He may even speak or laugh. But he remains sitting on his chair. He is more and more certain that he cannot get up.

He is unlike the bottoms of his own trousers. Calmly, quietly, and by imperceptible degreestheyget up. Higher and higher they ascend kneeward; they have an ambition to achieve the waist. Every little while he must unostentatiously, and with an easy, careless, indifferent, well-bred, and evenblaségesture, manage to pull them down.

I am referring, you understand, to the mature, married gentleman. Between boyhood and maturity there is a period (without which there would be fewer marriages, and perhaps none at all) when a call is a personal adventure, and it often happens that the recipientof the call, rather than the caller himself, fears that somehow or other he and his chair have grown together. But my boy friend, as I think you will agree when you consider his situation, does not, strictly speaking, call: he is taken to call. And just so is it with the average mature, married gentleman; the chief difference—and even this does not invariably hold good—is that he dresses himself. He has become part and parcel (particularly parcel) of a wise and necessary division of life in which the social end is taken over by a feminine partner. She is the expert. She knows when and where to call, what to say, and when to go home. Married, a gentleman has no further responsibilities in this business—except to come cheerfully and sit on his chair without wriggling. Sometimes, indeed, he takes a pleasure in it, butthat is only when he has momentarily forgotten that he is making a call. These are his rewarding moments; and then, the first thing he knows, somebody is 'making signs' that it is time to go home!

The wise man, noticing these 'signs,' comes home. He stands not upon the order of his coming, but comes at once.

A call, says Herbert Spencer, in hisPrinciples of Sociology, is 'evidently a remote sequence of that system under which a subordinate ruler had from time to time to show loyalty to a chief ruler by presenting himself to do homage.' The idea is plausible: was it not for this very reason that Cleopatra galleyed down the Cydnus to call on Antony,—a call that would probably have had a different effect on history if the lady had brought a husband,—and Sheba cameled across the desert to callon Solomon? The creditor character of the visitation survives in the common expression 'paying a call.' In both these cases, however, the calls took on a lighter and brighter aspect, a more reciprocally admiring and well-affected intimacy, than was strictly necessary to an act of political homage. One is, after all, human; and the absence of marital partners, whose presence is always a little subduing, must be taken into consideration. 'But Solomon,' you say, 'Solomon?' Sir and madam, I rise to your question. In such a situation a man with seven hundred wives is as good as a bachelor; and I think the fact that Solomon had seven hundred wives proves it.

Later the Feudal System provided natural scope for innumerable calls of this nature; visits, as we should now term them, because it was customaryfor the callers to bring their nighties—or would have been if the callers had had any. The Dark Ages, curiously enough, lacked this garment of the dark. But it was only after the Feudal Period that the call, as we now know and practise it, became a social custom; and even to this day feudalism, in an attenuated form, rules society, and the call is often enough an act of homage to the superior social chief. One might argue (except for the fact that Shebagaveas well as exhibited her treasurer to Solomon) that Mrs. Jones is but following historic precedent when she brings and exhibits Mr. Jones to Mrs. Smith. Or, again, it might be pointed out that both Cleopatra and Shebabrought their slaves. There is, apparently, more than one sequence (as Mr. Spencer would say), but there is also a wide divergence from original type. Only partly and occasionallyan act of homage, the call has become, broadly speaking, a recognition of exact social equality, as if the round, dignified American cheese in Grocer Brown's ice-box should receive and return a call from the round, dignified American cheese in Grocer Green's ice-box.

And it has become divisible into as many varieties as Mr. Heinz's pickles.—Thecall friendly('Let us go and call on the Smiths: I'd like to see them'); thecall compulsory('We reallymustmake that call on the Smiths'); thecall curious('I wonder if it's so, what I heard yesterday about the Smiths'); thecall convenient('As we haven't anything better to do this evening, we might call on the Smiths'); thecall proud('Suppose we get out the new motor, and run round to the Smiths'); and so forth, and so forth. But, howeverwe look at it, the call is dependent upon feminine initiative. Our mature married gentleman, unless he has had already a call to the ministry, has no call, socially speaking, to make calls. It is his wife's business. As British soldiers have grimly sung on their way to battle, 'He's there because he's there, because he's there, because he's there.' But it is his plain duty tosit on his chair. I do not hold it legitimate in him to 'sneak off' with Mr. Smith—and smoke.

Fortunately, however, once he is there, little else is expected of him—and nothing that a man should not be willing to do for his wife. A smile, an attentive manner, the general effect of having combed his hair and washed behind his ears, a word now and then to show that he is awake (I am assuming that he controls the tendency to wriggle)—and no more is needed.He is a lay figure, but not necessarily a lay figure of speech.

Unless a man who is taken to call is of an abnormally lively conversational habit, quick to think of something that may pass for a contribution to current thought, and even quicker to get it out, he had best accept his position as merely decorative, and try to be as decorative as possible. He should be so quick that the first words of his sentence have leaped into life before he is himself aware of what is to come hurrying after them; he may be so slow that the only sentence he has is still painfully climbing to the surface long after the proper time for its appearance has passed and been forgotten. Swallow it, my dear sir, swallow it. Silence, accompanied by a wise, appreciative glance of the eye, is better; for a man who has mastered the art of the wise look doeshis wife credit, and is taken home from a call with his faculties unimpaired and his self-respect undiminished: he is the same man as when he was taken out. But not so the man who starts, hesitates, and stops, as if he actually said, 'Hold-on-there-I-'ve-got-a-fine-idea—but—er—on second thought—er—I—er—that is—I guess—er—it isn't—worth hearing.'

Such a man, I say, adds little to the pleasure of himself or the company; he attracts attention only to disappoint it: and others are kind as well as sensible to ignore him. He should have kept on rapidly and developed his fine idea to the bitter end. Nor is it wise to attempt to shine, to dazzle, to surprise with a clever epigram, thoughtfully composed and tested by imaginary utterance before an imaginary charmed circle while dressing; for nothing sodiminishes confidence in an epigram as successive failures to get it into circulation. In calling, one must jump on the train of thought as it speeds by a way station; and there is no happy mean between jumping on a passing train and standing still on the platform—except, as I have suggested, a pleasant wave of the hand as the train passes.

'There are not many situations,' said Dr. Johnson, 'more incessantly uneasy than that in which the man is placed who is watching an opportunity to speak, without courage to take it when offered, and who, though he resolves to give a specimen of his abilities, always finds some reason or other for delaying to the next minute.'

I know that resolve; and yet how often have I, too, failed at the crucial moment to give the hoped-for specimen of my abilities! 'Not yet,' I have saidto myself, 'not yet. The time is not ripe.' And so I have waited, incessantly uneasy,—as Dr. Johnson well puts it,—but always finding some reason or other to postpone the fireworks. I was beset by a kind of gross selfishness—an unwillingness to giveanybodya specimen of my abilities. Let them chatter! Little do they guess—and never will they know—the abilities sitting on this chair! Givethema specimen! Yet I must confess also that my specimen seemed somehow isolated and apart from my environment. It was all right in itself, but it needed a setting; it was like a button without a coat, like an eye without a face, like a kiss without a companion.

IfI had to get on with but one article of furniture, I think I would choose a bed. One could if necessary sit, eat, read, and write in the bed. In past time it has been a social centre: the hostess received in it, the guests sat on benches, and the most distinguished visitor sat on the foot of the bed. It combines the uses of all the other articles in the '$198 de luxe special 4-room outfit' that I have seen advertised for the benefit of any newly married couple with twenty dollars of their own for the first payment. Very few houses, if any, nowadays are without furniture that nobody uses, chairs that nobody ever sits on, books that nobody ever reads, ornaments that nobody ever wants, pictures that nobody ever looks at; an accumulation of unessential objects thatdoes credit chiefly to the activity of manufacturers and merchants catering to our modern lust for unnecessary expenditure. Not so many centuries ago one or two books made quite a respectable library; dining-room tables were real banqueting boards laid on trestles and taken away after the banquet; one bench might well serve several Perfect Gentlemen to sit upon; and a chair of his own was the baron's privilege. Today the $198 de luxe special 4-room outfit would feel naked and ashamed without its '1 Pedestal' and '1 Piece of Statuary.' Yet what on earth does a happy couple, bravely starting life with twenty dollars, want of a pedestal and a piece of statuary? And I notice also that the outfit—'a complete home,' says the description—makes no provision for a kitchen; but perhaps they are no longer de luxe.

It is impossible, at this time, to recover with complete certainty the antiquity of the bed. We may presume that the Neanderthal man had a wife (as wives were then understood) and maintained a kind of housekeeping that may have gone no further than pawing some leaves together to sleep on; but this probably was a late development. Earlier we may imagine the wind blowing the autumn leaves together and a Neanderthal man lying down by chance on the pile. He found it pleasant, and, for a few thousand years, went out of his way to find piles of leaves to lie down on, until one day he hit upon the bright idea of piling the leaves together himself. Then for the first time a man had a bed. His sleep was localized; his pile of leaves, brought together by his own sedulous hands, became property. Monogamy was encouraged, and theidea of home came into being. Personally I have no doubt whatever that the man who made the first bed was so charmed with it that the practice of lying in bed in the morning began immediately; and it is probably a conservative statement that the later Pliocene era saw the custom well developed.

One wonders what the Neanderthal man would have thought of a de luxe 4-room outfit, or complete home, for $198.

Even to-day, however, there are many fortunate persons who are never awakened by an alarm-clock—that watchman's rattle, as it were, of Policeman Day. The invention is comparatively recent. Without trying to uncover the identity of the inventor, and thus adding one more to the Who's Who of Pernicious Persons, we may assume that it belongs naturally to theage of small and cheap clocks which dawned only in the nineteenth century. Some desire for it existed earlier. The learned Mrs. Carter, said Dr. Johnson, 'at a time when she was eager in study, did not awake as early as she wished, and she therefore had a contrivance that, at a certain hour, her chamber light should burn a string to which a heavy weight was suspended, which then fell with a sudden strong noise; this roused her from her sleep, and then she had no difficulty in getting up.'

This device, we judge, was peculiar to Mrs. Carter, than whom a less eager student would have congratulated herself that the sudden strong noise was over, and gone sweetly to sleep again. The venerable Bishop Ken, who believed that a man 'should take no more sleep than he can take at once,' had no need of it. He got up, we are told, atone or two o'clock in the morning 'and sometimes earlier,' and played the lute before putting on his clothes.

To me the interesting thing about these historic figures is that they got up with such elastic promptness, the one to study and the other to play the lute. The Bishop seems a shade the more eager; but there are details that Mrs. Carter would naturally have refrained from mentioning to Dr. Johnson, even at the brimming moment when he had just accepted her contribution to theRambler. For most of us—or alarm-clocks would not be made to ring continuously until the harassed bed-warmer gets up and stops the racket—this getting out of bed is no such easy matter; and perhaps it will be the same when Gabriel's trumpet is the alarm-clock. We are more like Boswell, honest sleeper, and have 'thought of a pulleyto raise me gradually'; and then have thought again and realized that even a pulley 'would give me pain, as it would counteract my internal disposition.' Let the world go hang; our internal disposition is to stay in bed: we cling tenaciously to non-existence—or rather, to that third state of consciousness when we are in the world but not of it.

There are those, no doubt, who will say that they have something better to do than waste their time wondering why they like to stay in bed, which they don't. They are persons who have never been bored by the monotony of dressing or have tried to vary it, sometimes beginning at one end, sometimes at the other, but always defeated by the hard fact that a man cannot button his collar until he has put on his shirt. If they condescend so far,they will say, with some truth, that it is a question of weather, and any fool knows that it is not pleasant to get out of a warm bed into a cold bedroom. The matter has been considered from that angle. 'I have been warm all night,' wrote Leigh Hunt, 'and find myself in a state perfectly suited to a warm-blooded animal. To get out of this state into the cold, besides the inharmonious and uncritical abruptness of the transition, is so unnatural to such a creature that the poets, refining upon the tortures of the damned, make one of their greatest agonies consist in being suddenly transported from heat to cold—from fire to ice. They are "haled" out of their "beds," says Milton, by "harpy-footed furies"—fellows who come to call them.'

But no man, say I, or woman either, ever lay in bed and devised logicalreasons for staying there—unless for the purposes of an essay, in which case the recumbent essayist, snuggle as he may, is mentally up and dressed. He is really awake. He has tied his necktie. He is a busy bee—and I can no more imagine a busy bee lying in bed than I can imagine lying in bed with one. He is no longer in the nice balance between sense and oblivion that is too serenely and irresponsibly comfortable to be consciously analyzed; and in which, so long as he can stay there without getting wider awake, nothing else matters.

Lying in bed being a half-way house between sleeping and waking, and the mind then equally indifferent to logic and exact realism, the lier in bed can and does create his own dreams: it is an inexpensive and gentlemanly pleasure. If his bent is that way, he becomes Big Man Me: Fortunatus's purse jinglesin his pocket; the slave jumps when he rubs the lamp; he excels in all manly sports. If you ask with what authority I can thus postulate the home-made dreams of any lier in bed but myself, the answer is easy. It is common knowledge that the half-awake minds of men thus employ themselves, and the fashion of their employment may be reasonably deduced from observation of individuals. Theegoeven of a modest man will be somewhat rampant; theegoof a conceited one would, barring its capability for infinite expansion, swell up and bust. But this riot of egoism has as little relation to the Fine Art of Lying in Bed as a movie play has to the fine art of the drama. The true artist may take fair advantage of his nice state of unreason to defy time and space, but he will respect essential verities. He will treat hisegolike the child it is; and,taking example from a careful mother, tie a rope to it when he lets it out to play. Thus he will capture a kind of immortality; and his lying in bed, a transitory state itself, will contradict the transitory character of life outside of it. Companions he has known and loved will come from whatever remote places to share these moments, for the Fine Art of Lying in Bed consists largely in cultivating that inward eye with which Wordsworth saw the daffodils.

Whether this can be done on the wooden pillow of the Japanese I have no way of knowing; but I suspect there were some admirable liers in bed among the Roman patricians who were grossly accused of effeminacy because they slept on feathers.

The north of China, where bedding is laid in winter on raised platforms gently heated by little furnaces underneath,must have produced some highly cultivated liers in bed. The proverbial shortness of the German bed (which perhaps explains the GermanKultur) may have tended to discourage the art and at the same time unconsciously stimulated a hatred of England, where the beds are proverbially generous. One can at least hope, however, that all beds are alike in this matter, provided the occupant is a proper lier, who can say fairly,—

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