The Perfect Gentleman | Page 5

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 as
ornamental 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 workers to 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 parlors 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; 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 wedding at 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.

IN THE CHAIR
About once 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 barber will 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