The Perfect Gentleman Part 3

The Smart Set of Solomon's day patronized him, yet he remained, quite naturally, beneath the notice of the Old Testament writers--unfas.h.i.+onable men, one may readily believe, living at a convenient period when a garment very much like our own bath-robe answered their own purposes, and could probably be bought ready-to-wear.

But one can no more think of a full-blown civilization without tailors than one can imagine a complex state of society in which, for example, the contemporary _Sat.u.r.day Evening Post_ would publish its Exclusive Sat.u.r.day Evening Styles, and gentlemen would habitually buy their patterns by bust-measure and cut out their new suits at home on the dining-room table. The idea may seem practical, but the bust with men is evidently not a reliable guide to all the other anatomical proportions.

Nor, again, however little the Old Testament concerns itself with tailors, did it fail to mention the first of them. The line goes back to Adam, cross-legged under the Tree--the first tailor and the first customer together--companioned, pleasantly enough, by the first 'little dressmaker.' They made their clothes together, and made them alike--an impressive, beautiful symbol of the perfect harmony between the s.e.xes that the world lost and is now slowly regaining.

Times have changed since Adam: the ap.r.o.n of his honest anxious handicraft--for it was the penalty of his sin that he would never be happy until he got it finished and put it on--has undergone many changes, in the course of which even its evolution into Plymouth Rock Pants, yes even those once seemingly eternal lines,--

When the pant-hunter pantless Is panting for pants,--

are now fading from human memory; yet until within the past few decades a gentleman had a tailor as inexorably as he had a nose. But now the immemorial visit to his tailor is no longer absolutely necessary. He may, if such is his inclination,--as I am sure it would have been Adam's,--get his new suit all finished and ready-to-wear. Charley Wax, the sartorially Perfect Gentleman, smiles invitation and encouragement from many a window; an army of elegant and expeditious employees, each as much like Charley Wax as is humanly possible, waits to conduct him to a million ready-to-wear suits. His intellect is appealed to by the plausible argument that we live in a _busy time_, in which the _leaders of men_ simply cannot _afford to waste_ their valuable hours by going to the tailor: at the ready-to-wear emporium you simply pay your money and take your choice.

Many a gentleman, suddenly discovering that he is a 'leader of men,' has deserted his tailor: many a gentleman, learning by experience that it takes as long to try on clothes in one place as another, has presently gone back to him. Starting with the democratic premise that all men are born equal, the ready-to-wear clothier proceeds on the further a.s.sumption that each man becomes in time either short, stout, or medium; and this amendment to the Declaration of Independence has indeed created a new republic of shorts, stouts, and mediums, in which Charley Wax is the perpetual president. Here, indeed, would seem to be a step toward patterns for gentlemen: one sees the gentleman in imagination happily cutting out his new spring suit on the dining-room table, or sitting cross-legged on that centre of domestic hospitality, while he hums a little tune to himself and merrily sews the sections together.

But unfortunately the shorts, stouts, and mediums are not respectively standard according to bust-measure. A gentleman, for example, may simultaneously be short in the legs, medium in the chest, and stout in the circ.u.mference: the secret of the ready-to-wear clothier lies in his ability to meet on the spot conditions which no single pattern could hope to antic.i.p.ate. We must go back toward nature, and stop short at Adam, to find a costume that any gentleman can successfully make for himself.

Personally I prefer the immemorial visit to the tailor; I like this restful atmosphere, in which unborn suits of clothes contentedly await creation in rolls of cloth, and the styles of the season are exhibited by pictures of gentlemen whose completely vacuous countenances comfortably repudiate the desirability of being 'leaders of men.' On the table the _Geographical Magazine_ invites to unexciting wonder at the way other people dress. From the next room one hears the voice of the tailor, leisurely reporting to his a.s.sistant as he tape-measures a customer. In the lineage of a vocation it is odd to think that his great-great-great grandfather might have sat cross-legged to inspire the poem

A carrion crow sat on an oak Watching a tailor shape a coat.

'Wife, bring me my old bent bow That I may shoot yon carrion crow.'

The tailor shot, and he missed the mark, And shot the miller's sow through the heart.

'Wife, O, wife, bring brandy in a spoon, For the old miller's sow is in a swoon.'

The quick and unexpected tragedy (for the sow) etches the old-time tailor at his work: one gets, as it were, a crow's-eye view of him.

Such, I imagine, was his universal aspect, cross-legged on a bench in his little stall or beside his open window, more skilled with shears and needle than with lethal weapon, despite the gallant brigade of tailors who went to battle under the banner of Queen Elizabeth. Yet I cannot imagine my own tailor sitting cross-legged beside an open window; nor, for that matter, sitting cross-legged anywhere, except perhaps on the sands of the sea in his proper bathing-suit. His genealogy begins with those 'taylours' who, in the nineteenth year of Henry VII, 'sewyd the Kynge to be callyd Marchante Taylours'--evidently earning the disfavor of their neighbors, for a 'grete grudge rose among dyuers other craftys in the cyte against them.' Very soon, I fancy, these Marchante Taylours began to pride themselves on the straightness of their legs, and let subordinate craftsmen stretch their sartorius muscles. But why, as Carlyle puts it, the idea had 'gone abroad, and fixed itself down in a wide-spreading rooted error, that Tailors are a distinct species in Physiology, not Men, but fractional Parts of a Man,' n.o.body has yet explained satisfactorily.

So one muses, comfortably awaiting the tailor, while the eye travels through far countries, glimpsing now and then a graceful figure that somehow reminds one of a darker complexioned September Morn, and helps perhaps to explain the wide-spread popularity of a magazine whose t.i.tle seems at first thought to limit it to a public-school circulation.

And yet, strangely enough, there are men whose wives find it difficult to persuade them to go to the tailor; or, for that matter to the ready-to-wear clothier. There is, after all, something undignified in standing on a little stool and being measured; nor is it a satisfactory subst.i.tute for this procedure to put on strange garments in a little closet and come forth to pose before mirrors under the critical eye of a living Charley Wax. Fortunately the tailor and the polite and expeditious salesman of the ready-to-wear emporium have this in common: art or nature has in both cases produced a man seemingly with no sense of humor. Fortunately, too, in both cases a gentleman goes alone to acquire a new suit. I have seen it suggested in the advertising column of the magazine that a young man should bring his fiancee with him, to help select his ready-to-wear garments; but the idea emanates from the imagination of an ad-writer, and I am sure that n.o.body concerned, except perhaps the fiancee, would welcome it in actual practice. Wives indeed, and maybe fiancees, sometimes accompany those they love when a hat is to be tried on and purchased; but I have been told in bitter confidence by a polite hatter that 'tis a custom more honored in the breach than in the observance; and this I think is sufficient reason why it should not be extended, so to speak, to the breeches.

SHAVING THOUGHTS

'Talking of shaving the other night at Dr. Taylor's,' wrote the biographer Boswell, 'Dr. Johnson said, "Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished." I thought this not possible, till he specified so many of the varieties in shaving,--holding the razor more or less perpendicular; drawing long or short strokes; beginning at the upper part of the face, or the under; at the right side or the left side. Indeed, when one considers what variety of sounds can be uttered by the windpipe, in the compa.s.s of a very small aperture, we may be convinced how many degrees of difference there may be in the application of the razor.'

So they talked of shaving at Dr. Taylor's before the advent of the safety-razor; and our curiosity can never be satisfied as to just what so acute an observer as Dr. Johnson would have thought of this characteristically modern invention to combine speed and convenience. I can imagine Boswell playfully reminding the doctor how that ill.u.s.trious friend had quite recently expressed his disapproval of bleeding. 'Sir,'

says Samuel, as he actually did on another occasion, 'courage is a quality necessary for maintaining virtue.' And he adds (blowing with high derision), 'Poh! If a man is to be intimidated by the possible contemplation of his own blood--let him grow whiskers.' At any rate among a thousand shavers to-day, two do not think so much alike that one may not be influenced by this consideration, and regard Byron, composing his verses while shaving, as a braver poet than if he had performed the operation with a safety.

The world of shavers is divided into three cla.s.ses: the ordinary shaver, the safety shaver, and the extraordinary-safety shaver, who buys each safety razor as soon as it is invented and is never so happy as when about to try a new one. To a shaver of this cla.s.s, cost is immaterial. A safety-razor for a cent, with twenty gold-monogramed blades and a guaranty of expert surgical attendance if he cuts himself, would stir his active interest neither more nor less than a safety-razor for a hundred dollars, with one Cannotbedull blade and an iron-clad agreement to pay the makers an indemnity if he found it unsatisfactory. He buys them secretly, lest his wife justly accuse him of extravagance, and practises cunning in getting rid of them afterward; for to a conscientious gentleman throwing away a razor is a responsible matter.

It is hard to think of any place where a razor-blade, indestructible and horribly sharp as it is,--for all purposes except shaving,--can be thrown away without some worry over possible consequences. A baby may find and swallow it; the ashman sever an artery; dropping it overboard at sea is impracticable, to say nothing of the danger to some innocent fish. Mailing it anonymously to the makers, although it is expensive, is a solution, or at least s.h.i.+fts the responsibility. Perhaps the safest course is to put the blades with the odds and ends you have been going to throw away to-morrow ever since you can remember; for there, while you live, n.o.body will ever disturb them. Once, indeed, I--but this is getting too personal: I was simply about to say that it is possible to purchase a twenty-five cent safety-razor, returnable if unsatisfactory, and find the place of sale vanished before you can get back to it. But between inventions in safety-razors, the extraordinary-safety shaver is likely to revert to first principles and the naked steel of his ancestors.

And as he shaves he will perhaps think sometimes of the unhappy Edward II of England, who, before his fall, wore his beard in three corkscrew curls--and was shaved afterward by a cruel jailer who had it done _with cold water_! The fallen monarch wept with discomfort and indignation.

'Here at least,' he exclaimed reproachfully, 'is warm water on my cheeks, whether you will or no.' But the heartless shave proceeded.

Razed away were those corkscrew curls from the royal chin, and so he comes down to us without them, shaved as well as bathed in tears--one of the most pitiful figures in history.

Personally, however, I prefer to think of kindlier scenes while shaving.

Nothing that I can do now can help poor Edward: no indignation of mine can warm that cold water; perhaps, after all, the cruel jailer had a natural and excusable hatred of corkscrew curls anywhere. I should feel quite differently about it if he had warmed the water; but although a man may shave himself with cold water, certainly n.o.body else has a right to.

There have been periods in the history of man when I, too, would probably have cultivated some form of whiskering. Perhaps, like Mr.

Richard Shute, I would have kept a gentleman (reduced) to read aloud to me while my valet starched and curled my whiskers--such being the mode in the seventeenth century when Mr. Shute was what they then called, without meaning offense, a turkey merchant; and indeed his pride in his whiskers was nothing out of the common. Or, being less able to support a valet to starch and curl, and a gentleman to read aloud 'on some useful subject,'--poor gentleman! I hope that he and Mr. Shute agreed as to what subjects were useful, but I have a feeling they didn't,--I might have had to economize, and might have been one of those who were 'so curious in the management of their beards that they had pasteboard cases to put over them at night, lest they turn upon them and rumple them in their sleep.'

Nevertheless, wives continued to respect their husbands in about the normal proportion. Within the relatively brief compa.s.s of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I, who would have gone smooth-shaven in the fourteenth, could conceivably have fluttered in at least thirty-eight separate and beautiful arrangements of moustaches, beard, and whiskers.

Nor, I suspect, did these arrangements always wait upon the slow processes of nature. One does not _have_ to grow whiskers. Napoleon's youthful officers were fiercely bewhiskered, but often with the aid of helpfully adhesive gum; and in the eighteen-thirties there occurs in the Boston _Transcript_, as a matter of course, an advertis.e.m.e.nt of 'gentlemen's whiskers ready-made or to order.' We see in imagination a quiet corner at the whisker's, with a mirror before which the Bostonian tries on his ready-made whiskers before ordering them sent home; or again, the Bostonian in doubt, selecting now this whisker, now that from the _Gentlemen's Own Whisker Book_, and still with a shade of indecision on his handsome face as he holds it up to be measured.

'Perhaps, after all, those _other_ whiskers--'

But the brisk, courteous person with the dividers and tape-measure is rea.s.suring. 'Elegant whiskers!' he repeats at intervals. 'They will do us both credit.'

The matter has, in fact, been intelligently studied; the beautifying effect of whiskers reduced to principles. If my face is too wide, a beard lengthens it; if my face is too narrow, it expands as if by magic with the addition of what have sometimes been affectionately called 'mutton chops,' or 'siders'; if my nose projects, almost like a nose trying to escape from a face to which it has been sentenced for life, a pair of large, handsome moustaches will provide a proper entourage--a nest, so to speak, on which the nose rests contentedly, almost like a setting hen; if my nose retreats backward into my face, the aesthetic solution is obviously galways. A stout gentleman can do wonders with his appearance by adopting a pointed beard, and a suit of clothes, s.h.i.+rt, necktie, and stockings with p.r.o.nounced vertical stripes. A thin one, on the other hand, becomes at once substantial in effect, without being gross, if he cultivates side-whiskers, and wears a suit of clothes, s.h.i.+rt, cravat, and stockings with p.r.o.nounced horizontal stripes. If my face lacks fierceness and dynamic force, it needs a brisk, arrogant moustache; or if it has too much of these qualities, a long, sad, drooping moustache will counterbalance them. I read in my volume of _Romantic Love and Personal Beauty_ that 'the movements of the moustache are dependent on the muscle called _depressor alae nasi_. By specially cultivating this muscle, men might in course of time make the movements of the moustache subject to voluntary control.'

Just think what a capacity for emotional expression lies in such a simple organ as the dog's caudal appendage, aptly called the 'psychographic tail' by Vischer; and moustaches are double, and therefore equal to two psychographic appendages! Truly I know not of which to think first--a happy gentleman wagging his moustache or a happy dog wagging two tails. And yet here am I, shaving away the daily effort of this double psychographic appendage to become visible! One might almost think that my _depressor alae nasi_ was a vermiform appendix.

It has been said by some critics that whiskers are a disguise. I should be unwilling to commit myself to this belief; nor can I accept the contrary conviction that whiskers are a gift of Almighty Providence in which the Giver is so sensitively interested that to shave them off is to invite eternal punishment of a kind--and this, I think, destroys the theory--that would singe them off in about two seconds. Whiskers are real, and sometimes uncomfortably earnest; the belief that they betoken an almost brutal masculine force is visible in this, that those whose whiskers are naturally thinnest take the greatest satisfaction in possessing them--seem, in fact, to say proudly, '_These_ are my whiskers!' But I cannot feel that a gentleman is any more disguised by his whiskers, real, ready-made, or made to order, than he would be if he appeared naked or in a ready-made or made-to-order suit. Whiskers, in fact, are a subtle revelation of real character, whether the kind that exist as a soft, mysterious haze about the lower features or such as inspired the immortal limerick,--I quote from memory,--

There was an old man with a beard Who said, 'I am greatly afeard Two larks and a hen, A jay and a wren, Have each made a nest in my beard.'

Yet I feel also, and strongly, that the man who shaves clean stands, as it were, on his own face.

We have, indeed, but to visualize clearly the spectacle of a gentleman shaving himself and put beside it the spectacle of a gentleman starching and curling his whiskers, to see the finer personal dignity that has come with the general adoption of the razor. I am not going to attempt to describe a gentleman starching and curling his whiskers,--it would be too horrible,--but I like to dwell on the shaver. He whistles or perhaps hums. He draws hot water from the faucet--Alas, poor Edward! He makes a rich, creamy lather either in a mug or (for the sake of literary directness) on his own with a shaving-stick. He strops his razor, or perhaps selects a blade already sharpened for his convenience. He rubs in the lather. He shaves, and, as Dr. Johnson so shrewdly pointed out that night at Dr. Taylor's, 'Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished.' Perhaps he cuts himself, for a clever man at self-mutilation can do it, even with a safety; but who cares? Come, Little Alum, the shaver's friend, smartly to the rescue! And then, he exercises the shaver's prerogative and powders his face.

Fortunately the process does not always go so smoothly. There are times when the Local Brotherhood of Razors have gone on strike and refuse to be stropped. There are times at which the twelve interchangeable blades are hardly better for shaving than twelve interchangeable postage-stamps. There are times when the lather might have been fairly guaranteed to dry on the face. There are times when Little Alum, the shaver's friend, might well feel the sting of his own powerlessness. But these times are the blessed cause of genial satisfaction when everything goes happily.

Truly it is worth while to grow a beard--for the sake of shaving it off.

Not such a beard as one might starch and curl--but the beginnings--an obfuscation of the chin, cheeks, and upper lip--a horror of unseemly growth--a landscape of the face comparable to

that ominous tract which, all agree, Hides the Dark Tower

in Browning's grim poem of 'Childe Roland.' _Then_ is the time to strop your favorite razor! I wonder, while stropping mine, if any man still lives who uses a moustache cup?

OH, THE AFTERNOON TEA!

Any man who knows that, sooner or later, he must go to another afternoon tea cannot but rejoice at the recent invention of an oval, platter-like saucer, large enough to hold with ease a cup, a lettuce or other sandwich, and a dainty trifle of pastry. The thing was needed: the modesty of the anonymous inventor--evidently _not_ Mr. Edison--reveals him one of the large body of occasional and unwilling tea-goers. We, the reluctant and unwilling, are all strangely alike at these functions; and we have all been embarra.s.sed by the old-fas.h.i.+oned saucer. Circular in shape, and hardly larger than the cup that belies its reputation and dances drunkenly whenever another guest joggles our elbow,--which happens so often that we suspect conspiracy,--the old-fas.h.i.+oned saucer affords no reasonably secure perch for a sandwich; responds with delight to the law of gravitation if left to itself; and sets us wis.h.i.+ng, those of us who think scientifically, that evolution had refrained from doing away with an extension by which alone we could now hope to manage it.

_We mean a tail!_ If afternoon teas had been started in the Oligocene Epoch instead of the seventeenth century, we are convinced that evolution, far from discarding this useful appendage, would have perfected it. A little hand would have evolved at the end of it--such a one as might hold a Perfect Gentleman's saucer while he sipped from his tea-cup.

Nay, more. In many ways that will at once occur to the intelligent reader this little hand would be helpful in our complex modern civilization. It would hold this essay. It would turn the music at the piano. It would enable two well-disposed persons cordially to shake hands when their four other hands were busy with bundles. It would slap the coward mosquito that stabs in the back. It would be absolutely perfect for waving farewell. Nor would there be anything 'funny' about it, or shocking to the most refined sensibilities: the vulgar would laugh and the refined would hide a shudder at the sight of a man with no tail! We would, of course, all look like the Devil, but everybody knows that _his_ tail has never yet kept him out of polite society.

This digression, however, leads us away from our subject into alien regrets. We put it behind us.

The truth is, we do not like your afternoon teas--except those little ones, like the nice children of an objectionable mother, that are informal, intimate, and not destructive of our ident.i.ty. At larger gatherings we have no ident.i.ty: we are supernumeraries, mere tea-cup bearers, wooden Indians who have been through Hampton, hand-carved gentlemen, automaton tea-goers. In short, we are so many lay figures, each with a tea-cup in one hand and food in the other; we know that we are smiling because we can feel it; we remain where we are laid until forcibly moved to another spot, and we are capable, under pressure, of emitting a few set phrases that resemble human speech.

Yet within this odd simulacrum of a worldly, entertaining, and interested gentleman, a living mind surveys the gay scene with a strange, emotionless detachment--just so, perhaps, will it eventually survive the body. We are really alive, conscious that we dislike change, nervous when moved and stood up in another place, and intellectually certain that no real harm can come to us. One is reminded of Seneca's observation: _Vere magnum, habere fragilitatem hominis, securitatem dei._ There is about us something of the frailty of a man, something of the security of a G.o.d; the pity of it is that we cannot follow Seneca to his conclusion and comfort ourselves with the thought that we are 'truly great.'