Part 15
We have stifled our language, we have debased it, we have been afraid of it. But some day it will reassert itself, for it is stronger than we, alike our overlord and avatar. Deep in the soul of man dwells the lyric impulse, and when his song cannot be the song of the poet it will shape itself in rhythmic prose, that it may still be cadenced and modulated to change with the changing thought and sound an obligato to the moods of the author's spirit. How wonderful has been our prose,--grave and chastely rich when Hooker wrote it, striding triumphant over the pages of Gibbon on tireless feet, ringing like a trumpet from Emerson's white house in Concord, modulated like soft organ-music heard afar in Newman's lyric moods, clanging and clamorous in Carlyle, in Walter Pater but as the soft fall of water in a marble fountain while exquisite odors flood the Roman twilight and late bees are murmurous, a little of all, perhaps, in Stevenson! We, too, we little fellows of to-day, could write as they wrote, consciously, rhythmically, if we only cared, if we only dared. We ask for the opportunity, the encouragement. Alas! that also means a more liberal choice of graver subjects, and a more extensive employment of the essay form. Milton could hardly have been Miltonic on a lesser theme than the Fall of the Angels, and Walter Pater wrote of the Mona Lisa, not Lizzie Smith of Davenport, Iowa. It is doubtless of interest to learn about Lizzie, but she hardly inspires us to rhythmic prose.
In the Chair
By Ralph Bergengren
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 canteloupe, with too much hair on it, as very likely several friends and acquaintances 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 feel differently; and I know of one man, returning home with a new haircut, who 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 indicating 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 a brief 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 ground that 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 shaven, 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 accustoms us 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--who cut 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 made 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,' where nobody could see him but the hardened attendants, by his sensitive family. 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 pretend to be deeply interested in the _Illustrated 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 the _Police Gazette_. And this opportunity to hold the _Police Gazette_ without 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 the _Illustrated 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 the _Illustrated London News_, the mirror gives 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 the _Illustrated 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? A krees? 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 give _his_ head to the barber. A boy hastily sweeps up the hair that was yours--already as remote from you as if it had belonged to the man who is always waiting, and whose name is Next. Oh, it is horrible--horrible--horrible!
The Passing of Indoors
By Zephine Humphrey
Indoors is going. We may just as well make up our minds on this revolutionary point, and accept it with such degree of hardy rejoicing or shivering regret as our natures prompt in us.
The movement has been long under way, gradually working the perfect ejection which seems now at hand. We might have recognized the dislodging process long ago, had we been far-sighted enough. It began--who shall say when it did begin? Surely not in the shaggy breasts of those rude ancestors of ours whom we hold in such veneration, and to whose ways we seem to ourselves to be so wisely returning. They dragged their venison into the depths of a cave darker and closer than any house, and devoured it in great seclusion. Perhaps it began in the San Marco Piazza at Venice, with the little open-air tables under the colonnades. "So delightful! So charming!" Thus the tourists, as they sipped their coffee and dallied with their ices. They were right; it was delightful and charming, and so it is to this day, but it was perhaps the thin edge of the wedge which is turning us all out now.
Supper was the first regular meal to follow the open-air suggestion, country supper on the piazza in the warm summer evening. That also was delightful, of course, and not at all alarming. All nations and ages have practiced the sport of occasional festive repasts out of doors when the weather has permitted. But breakfast was not long in following suit; and when dinner, that most conservative, conventional of meals, succumbed to the outward pressure and spread its congealing gravies in the chilly air, we were in for the thing in good earnest, the new custom was on. No longer a matter of times and seasons, the weather had nothing to do with it now; and in really zealous families the regular summer dining-room was out of doors. Summer dining-room--that sounds well; since summer and warmth go together traditionally. But not always actually in New England, where bleak rains overtake the world now and then, and clearing north-west winds come racing keenly. It was soon essential to introduce a new fashion in dinner garments: overcoats, sweaters, and heavy shawls, felt hats and mufflers.
'Excuse me while I run upstairs to get a pair of mittens?'
'Finish your soup first, dear; it will be quite cold if you leave it.'
The adherents of the new doctrine are very conscientious and faithful, as was only to be expected. We are a valiant race in the matter of our enthusiasms and can be trusted to follow them sturdily, buckling on armor or overcoats or whatever other special equipment the occasion demands. Conscientiousness is a good trait, but there is perhaps more of the joy of life in some other qualities.
Sleeping outdoors was the next great phase in the open-air movement. That also began casually enough and altogether charmingly. One lingered in the hammock, watching the stars, musing in the still summer night, until, lo! there was the dawn beginning behind the eastern hills. A wonderful experience. Not much sleeping about it truly,--there is commonly not much sleeping about great experiences,--but so beautiful that the heart said, 'Go to! why not have this always? Why not sleep outdoors every night?' Which is of course exactly the way in which human nature works; very reasonable, very sane and convincing, but unfortunately never quite so successful as it should be. That which has blessed us once must be secured in perpetuity for our souls to feast on continually; revelation must fold its wings and abide with us. So we soberly go to work and strip all the poetry of divine chance, all the delight of the unexpected, from our great occasions by laying plans for their systematic recurrence.
He who bends to himself a joy, Does the winged life destroy; But he who kisses a joy as it flies, Lives in eternity's sunrise.
It is a pity that William Blake could not teach us that once for all. As a matter of fact, of course, great occasions care nothing at all for our urging; and a plan is an institution which they cordially abhor. The stars and the dawn do not condescend to such paraphernalia for waylaying them as sleeping-bags, rubber blankets, air-pillows, and mosquito netting, with a stout club close at hand in case of tramps or a skunk.
One experience of my own recurs to my memory poignantly here, and I think I cannot do better than set it forth. I had passed an unforgettable night all alone in a meadow, detained by the evening almost insensibly into 'solemn midnight's tingling silences,' and thence into the austere dawn. It was an episode such as should have sealed my lips forever; but I profanely spoke of it, and at once the contagion of interest spread through the little village.
'What fun! Did you have your rubbers on? Did you sit in a chair? I should think you would have sat in a chair--so much more comfortable! Well, I tell you what, let's do it together,--a lot of us, so we won't be afraid,--and let's climb a mountain. The sunset and dawn will be beautiful from a mountain.'
We did it; I blush to confess that some twenty-five of us did it. It was an excursion planned and discussed for a matter of two weeks (a full moon being part of the programme), and there was no accident unforeseen, no event unprovided for. The procession that wended its way, toiling and puffing, up the ascent of Haystack,--the favored mountain selected for the high pedestal of our rapture,--on the auspicious night, was about as sad, and withal as funny, an affront as the secrecy of beauty ever received. Blankets, steamer-rugs, pillows, shawls, hammocks, whiskey-flasks--how we groaned beneath the burden of all these things. We lost the way, of course, and had to beat the woods in every direction; we were tired and hot and--cross? Perhaps. But we knew what our rôle was, and when we reached the top of the mountain, we all of us stood very solemnly in a row and said, 'How beautiful!'
It was beautiful; that was just the fineness of the night's triumph over us--over me at least; I cannot speak for the other twenty-four. To this day, be it said in parentheses, whenever we mention that night on Haystack we lift our eyes in ecstasy, and no one of us has ever confessed any sense of lack. But honestly, honestly at the last (dear stalwart relief of honesty!), that experiment was a failure--so beautiful that the spirit should have been lifted out of the body, and would have been, had it stood alone, had it not already exhausted itself in plans and expectations. Beneath us, a far-spreading sea of misty, rolling hills, all vague and blended in the light of the soaring moon; above us, such a sweep of sky as only mountain-tops command; around us, silence, silence. Yet the unstrenuous orchard at home, with its tranquil acceptance of such degree of sunset light as was granted to it, and of the moon's presence when she rose above the apple trees, would have conveyed the night's message a thousand times more clearly.
It is seldom worth while to describe any failure of the spirit very minutely, and tragedy is not the tone this paper would assume; but one slight episode of the dawn following that fatal night must be related. We were gathered on the eastern edge of our mountain top, a tousled, gray, disheveled lot, heavy-eyed and weary. Does the reader understand the significance of the term 'to prevent the dawn'? He does if he has stood and waited for the sun to rise--or the moon or any of the constellations, for that matter. All heavenly bodies retard their progress through the influence of being waited for. 'Surely now!' a dozen times we warned one another there, with our faces toward the quickening east; yet no glittering, lambent rim slid up to greet our eyes.
At last a decent comely cloud came to the rescue of the sun, halting and embarrassed, and settled snugly all about the mountain of the day-spring. Into this the sun was born, so obscurely that it rode high above the mountain's edge, shorn and dull, a rubber ball, before we discovered it. 'Why--why--' some one began, stammering; and then there was a dramatic pause. Brave and determined though we were in our pursuit of ecstasy, we could not burst forth into song like Memnon statues at the sight of that belated orange, 'Lo, the Lord Sun!' Not at all. It was the merest varlet. In this dilemma of our hearts, a funny little wailing cry came from the cliff's edge: 'I want my money back! I want my money back!' It was a perfect commentary on the whole situation, as fine and humorous and true an utterance as could be asked on the foiled occasion. We laughed at it, and all the air was straightway clearer for us. Then down the mountain-side we trooped, and went home to bed.
Of course I am not unaware of the impatience of some readers, if they have taken pains to scan so far this earnest exposition. The outdoor movement is not one primarily of sentiment, but of health and happiness; and the story just related is aside from the point. That may be true. I certainly stand in respect of the great claims of the physical side of the subject, and would not deal with them. By all means, let all people be as well as possible. But it is still the other side, the side of sentiment and rapture, which is most pleadingly often brought home to me.
It is pitiful how helpless we are against the invasions of a new enthusiasm like this--we sober, conservative folk. I still sleep in my bed, in my room, but the satisfaction I used to take in the innocent practice is broken of late by haunting fears that I may not be able to keep it up. My friends will not let me alone.
'Of all things! why don't you sleep out here, on this little upper piazza? Precisely the place! I can't understand how you can ignore such an opportunity.'
'Well, you see,'--my answer was glib at first,--'the piazza overhangs the road, and the milk-wagons go by very early. I don't want to get up at four o'clock every morning.'
'They couldn't see much of you, I should think,'--with a thoughtful measuring glance,--'not more than your toes and the tip of your nose.'
'Oh, thank you, that's quite enough!'
'Well, you might saw off the legs of a cot, to bring it below the railing. Or just a mattress spread on the floor would do very well.'
Just a mattress spread on the floor! That closes the argument. I have no spirit left to prefer any other objections to these dauntless souls, such as the rain (the piazza has no roof). But what would a cold bath be if not distinctly so much to the good in view of the toilet operations of the following morning? There is no course left me but that final one,--which should in honesty have come first,--of damning myself by the hopeless assertion, 'I don't want to sleep out of doors.' This locks the argument, and the barrier stands complete, shutting me off in a world by myself, interrupting the genial flow of sympathetic friendship. But I love my friends. Therefore it follows that I tremble for my further repose in my bed. I fear I shall yet utter midnight sighs on that piazza floor.