Ralph Bergengren

“ A person whose chief desire in life at the moment is to be becomingly dressed comes to one whose chief ambition in life at the moment is to becomingly dress him. No hideous and insistent apprehension preys on the mind of the waiting customer; for the tailor's worst tool is a tape-measure, and his worst discovery may be that the customer is growing fat. One waits, [95] indeed, without serious apprehension, at the barber's; but here the company is mixed and the knowledge inescapable that it will look on with idle interest while he cuts your hair or covers your honest face with lather. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 who must have 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. ”

“ 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 assistant as he tape-measures a customer. ”

“ In a 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ If all men were hungry, naked, and homeless, and the afternoon tea provided food, clothes, and a home, any man would jump at an invitation. But there are other necessities of living—and here, too, I in my porcelain dish am one with Christopher Columbus, Lord Chesterfield, Chang the Chinese Giant, the Editor of the Atlantic, and the humblest illiterate who never heard of him—of which we are not so vividly conscious. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 as [46] an Adamite, bestriding, like a colossus, a wide-spread newspaper, and taking a bath afterward. ”

“ After all, when a thing cannot be escaped, why seek for reasons not to escape it? Let us, rather, be brave if we cannot be gay; cheerful if we cannot talk; ornamental if we cannot move. As the grave-digger in Elsinore churchyard might say: 'Here lies the afternoon tea; good: here stands the gentleman; good: If the gentleman go to this afternoon tea and bore himself, it is, will he, nill he, he goes,—mark you that? But if the afternoon tea come to him and bore him, he bores not himself ”

“ We come nearer perhaps to the universal understanding in John Hay's definition that 'Friends are the sunshine of life'; for it is equally true that all men seek sunlight and that every man seeks a friend after his own kind and nature. The best and most intelligent of us admit the rarity and value of friendship; the worst and most ignorant of us are unwittingly the better for knowing some friendly companion. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 to sit on his chair. ”

“ The truth is, we do not like your afternoon teas—except those little [125] ones, like the nice children of an objectionable mother, that are informal, intimate, and not destructive of our identity. At larger gatherings we have no identity: 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 ”

“ 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 assumption that each man [100] 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. ”

“ 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 sexes that the world lost and is now slowly regaining. ”

“ 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. [53]
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, on one another. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [126] 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. ”

“ 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 parlors [26] where 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 even dégagé, for the most Perfect Gentleman to wait in what still remains to him, while an obliging fellow creature swiftly presses his trousers ”

“ 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 of savoir-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 perhaps [54] this is true of all thrones—from which no altogether self-satisfactory descent is possible ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 ”

“ Your Complete Bore, however, is incapable of this treatment, for he does not know that he is a bore. It is only the Occasional Bore, a sensitive, well-meaning fellow who would not harm anybody, whose head lies sleepless on a pillow hot with his blushes while he goes over and over so apt and tripping a dialogue that it would withhold Gabriel from blowing his trumpet. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 [108] shaving, as a braver poet than if he had performed the operation with a safety.
The world of shavers is divided into three classes: 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. ”

“ Boredom, in fact, is an acquired distaste—a by-product of the printing-press and steam-engine, which between [83] them have made and kept mankind busier than Solomon in all his wisdom could have imagined. Our arboreal ancestor could neither bore nor be bored. ”