The Perfect Gentleman | Page 9

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 contortionist manner. 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, a je 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 not say how some
moistened that blacking, but you and I, gentle reader, brought water in

a crystal glass from the kitchen,--and an 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 the Declaration 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 been a 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
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. He sat or stood where anybody might see him,
almost as 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-known Age 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,