The Ways of Men. Eliot Gregory
have guards screwed on from behind, and undergarments—but here modesty stops my pen.
Seeing that I was interested in their make-up, several travelling agents on the train got out their boxes and showed me the latest artifices that could be attached to the person. One gentleman produced a collection of rings made to go on the finger with a spring, like bracelets, an arrangement, he explained, that was particularly convenient for people afflicted with enlarged joints!
Another tempted me with what he called a “literary shirt front,”—it was in fact a paper pad, from which for cleanliness a leaf could be peeled each morning; the “wrong” side of the sheet thus removed contained a calendar, much useful information, and the chapters of a “continued” story, which ended when the “dickey” was used up.
A third traveller was “pushing” a collar-button that plied as many trades as Figaro, combining the functions of cravat-holder, stud, and scarf-pin. Not being successful in selling me one of these, he brought forward something ”without which,” he assured me, “no gentleman’s wardrobe was complete”! It proved to be an insidious arrangement of gilt wire, which he adjusted on his poor, overworked collar-button, and then tied his cravat through and around it. “No tie thus made,” he said, “would ever slip or get crooked.” He had been so civil that it was embarrassing not to buy something of him; I invested twenty-five cents in the cravat-holder, as it seemed the least complicated of the patents on exhibition; not, however, having graduated in a school of mechanics I have never been able to make it work. It takes an hour to tie a cravat with its aid, and as long to get it untied. Most of the men in that car, I found, got around the difficulty by wearing ready-made ties which fastened behind with a clasp.
It has been suggested that the reason our compatriots have such a strained and anxious look is because they are all trying to remember the numbers of their streets and houses, the floor their office is on, and the combination of their safes. I am inclined to think that the hunted look we wear comes from an awful fear of forgetting the secrets of our patents and being unable to undo ourselves in an emergency!
Think for a moment of the horror of coming home tired and sleepy after a convivial evening, and finding that some of your hidden machinery had gone wrong; that by a sudden movement you had disturbed the nice balance of some lever which in revenge refused to release its prey! The inventors of one well-known cuff-holder claim that it had a “bull-dog grip.” Think of sitting dressed all night in the embrace of that mechanical canine until the inventor could be called in to set you free!
I never doubted that bravery was the leading characteristic of the American temperament; since that glimpse into the secret composition of my compatriots, admiration has been vastly increased. The foolhardy daring it must require—dressed as those men were—to go out in a thunder-storm makes one shudder: it certainly could not be found in any other race. The danger of cross-country hunting or bull-fighting is as nothing compared to the risk a modern American takes when he sits in a trolley-car, where the chances of his machinery forming a fatal “short circuit” must be immense. The utter impossibility in which he finds himself of making a toilet quickly on account of so many time-saving accessories must increase his chances of getting “left” in an accident about fifty per cent. Who but one of our people could contemplate with equanimity the thought of attempting the adjustment of such delicate and difficult combinations while a steamer was sinking and the life-boats being manned?
Our grandfathers contributed the wooden nutmeg to civilization, and endowed a grateful universe with other money-saving devices. To-day the inventor takes the American baby from his cradle and does not release him even at the grave. What a treat one of the machine-made men of to-day will be to the archeologists of the year 3000, when they chance upon a well-preserved specimen, with all his patents thick upon I him! With a prophetic eye one can almost see the kindly old gentleman of that day studying the paraphernalia found in the tomb and attempting to account for the different pieces. Ink will flow and discussions rage between the camp maintaining that cuff-holders were tutelar deities buried with the dead by pious relatives and the croup asserting that the little pieces of steel were a form of pocket money in the year 1900. Both will probably misquote Tennyson and Kipling in support of their theories.
The question has often been raised, What side of our nineteenth-century civilization will be most admired by future generations? In view of the above facts there can remain little doubt that when the secrets of the paper collar and the trouser-stretcher have become lost arts, it will be those benefits that remote ages will envy us, and rare specimens of “ventilated shoes” and “reversible tissue-paper undergarments” will form the choicest treasures of the collector.
CHAPTER 5—Parnassus
Many years ago, a gentleman with whom I was driving in a distant quarter of Paris took me to a house on the rue Montparnasse, where we remained an hour or more, he chatting with its owner, and I listening to their conversation, and wondering at the confusion of books in the big room. As we drove away, my companion turned to me and said, “Don’t forget this afternoon. You have seen one of the greatest writers our century has produced, although the world does not yet realize it. You will learn to love his works when you are older, and it will be a satisfaction to remember that you saw and spoke with him in the flesh! “
When I returned later to Paris the little house had changed hands, and a marble tablet stating that Sainte-Beuve had lived and died there adorned its façade. My student footsteps took me many times through that quiet street, but never without a vision of the poet-critic flashing back, as I glanced up at the window where he had stood and talked with us; as my friend predicted, Sainte-Beuve’s writings had become a precious part of my small library, the memory of his genial face adding a vivid interest to their perusal.
I made a little Pilgrimage recently to the quiet old garden where, after many years’ delay, a bust of this writer has been unveiled, with the same companion, now very old, who thirty years ago presented me to the original.
There is, perhaps, in all Paris no more exquisite corner than the Garden of the Luxembourg. At every season it is beautiful. The winter sunlight seems to linger on its stately Italian terraces after it has ceased to shine elsewhere. The first lilacs bloom here in the spring, and when midsummer has turned all the rest of Paris into a blazing, white wilderness, these gardens remain cool and tranquil in the heart of turbulent “Bohemia,” a bit of fragrant nature filled with the song of birds and the voices of children. Surely it was a gracious inspiration that selected this shady park as the “Poets’ Corner” of great, new Paris. Henri Murger, Leconte de Lisle, Théodore de Banville, Paul Verlaine, are here, and now Sainte-Beuve has come back to his favorite haunt. Like François Coppée and Victor Hugo, he loved these historic allées, and knew the stone in them as he knew the “Latin Quater,” for his life was passed between the bookstalls of the quays and the outlying street where he lived.
As we sat resting in the shade, my companion, who had been one of Sainte-Beuve’s pupils, fell to talking of his master, his memory refreshed by the familiar surroundings. “Can anything be sadder,” he said, “than finding a face one has loved turned into stone, or names that were the watchwords of one’s youth serving as signs at street corners—la rue Flaubert or Théodore de Banville? How far away they make the past seem! Poor Sainte-Beuve, that bust yonder is but a poor reward for a life of toil, a modest tribute to his encyclopædic brain! His works, however, are his best monument; he would be the last to repine or cavil.
“The literary world of my day had two poles, between which it vibrated. The little house in the rue Montparnasse was one, the rock of Guernsey the other. We spoke with awe of ‘Father Hugo’ and mentioned ‘Uncle Beuve’ with tenderness. The Goncourt brothers accepted Sainte-Beuve’s judgment on their work as the verdict of a ‘Supreme Court.’ Not a poet or author of that day but climbed with a beating heart the narrow staircase that led to the great writer’s library. Paul Verlaine regarded as his literary diploma a letter from this ‘Balzac de la critique.’ ”
“At the entrance