From the Easy Chair, Volume 3

by George William Curtis

HERE is a class of unrecognized public benefactors to which the Easy Chair wishes to offer a respectful tribute of gratitude. Their service is none the less because it is unconscious; and it is not confined to either sex. It is, besides, a very varied service, as will be readily seen as we advance in our description. Let us, then, without delay, and to begin with, specify as benefactors of this kind the young and other gentlemen who do duty at club windows, and the ladies who kindly appear only in the latest fashions. Most men, intent upon the necessary industry wherewith they maintain their families, are content to live plainly, and can seldom escape their work. There is Sunday, indeed, and a happy hour in the Park, and perhaps a run in the summer for a week or two to Long Branch or the mountains. But black care generally attends as a body-servant, not always or immediately recognizable, but like that solemn waiter whom Mr. George Hadder describes at a dinner given by Leech, the artist, who announced the feast with the air of an undertaker, and who proved to be the clerk of the neighboring parish,—a little story which may be found, with much other entertaining reading, in a handy volume of Mr. Stoddard's "Bric-à-Brac Series."

But the busy man's imagination is still at play, and he fancies a life which he does not know, a life of elegant and boundless leisure, which hovers above and around his weary routine, and a life in which his home is spacious and splendid, where he is clad in handsome clothes and never troubled by his tailor's bill, because he has always a balance in the bank; a life in which he opens his eyes in the morning, not to wonder if he has overslept himself and to plunge out of bed and into his clothes and through his breakfast, to hurry to the car or omnibus, dreading to be too late—opens his eyes, we say, not for this, but languidly to wonder, as he looks from under the hangings, how most easily and pleasantly to while away the time. A wise author says that the beauty of the landscape is only a mirage seen from the windows of a diligence. So is the life of leisure which the busy man sees in fancy and in the tales which in his hasty way he sometimes reads on a rainy Sunday or in the evening. Yet it would be mere fable to him except for the benevolent genii in the club window. As he hurries homeward when his day's work is done, he lifts his eye as he passes upon the sidewalk, or he peers from the omnibus window, and lo! there stands the man to whom this leisure of his dreams is a daily reality.

The figure which is making these dreams real, and which he cannot but regard as a benefactor, stands in the spacious window, and there is often a group of such figures; always with the hat on, and generally with a cane in the hand, and such garments as are seen only in the plates of the fashions and upon the tailor's lay-figures. Why, being in a warm house, he should wear his hat, when he takes it off upon entering all other houses, doth not appear. But it is part of his office to wear it. For this representative of leisure models himself upon the habits of similar ministers in those tales which the busy man sometimes reads; and as Fitz-Clarence Mortimer wears his hat in the club window upon Pall Mall, so must the hat be worn in our own club windows. Do not think that hatted figure gazing at the passing ladies and carriages rolling to the Park is a useless dandy. Nature wastes nothing. Nature does not inspire him to pay tailors and shoemakers and jewellers and hatters, and then to stand sucking the head of a cane in a club window without a purpose. The brilliancy and perfume of flowers and the song of birds, as science shows, are not for our delight only; they serve the reproduction and perpetuity of life. The final cause of that hatted figure is not the advertising of a tailor; it is the effect upon the imagination. It serves the end of all art. It makes real to the busy citizen that life of leisure and of opportunity of which he reads and dreams.

Nor does it end with the suggestion. As the busy man goes by and beholds the apparition, he reflects upon the use of such opportunity as is revealed to him at the window. That man, he says, born to a fortune, or having by faithful industry and sagacity early amassed it, is now master of his life. He commands time and money, the two levers which are so powerful in heaving the world forward. He has but to devise how he can be of service to others, and obey the leading of his generous soul. Think of the hearths and the hearts that he cheers! Think of the knowledge that he acquires, the studies that he pursues, for the enlightenment of legislation and the practical advantage of government! Think how gladly he bears his part in the work of organized charities! He has what so few of us have—time and money. He can do so much, so much! What can he not do? So muses the busy man, who must give all his day, and some of the night often, to earning the pittance upon which he lives. And as he muses his good heart asks him why he should require everything of the hatted figure of leisure in the club window, and discharge his own debt of duty by thinking how easily another can discharge his. Everything in its degree, he says, as his steps quicken with the thought. One star differeth from another star in glory. Why, because that man, born in the purple or winning it, can do so much, can I do nothing? Because his whole life is that leisure of endless opportunity of which I can only dream, have I no minutes, no chances? Haunted by this thought, he finds even his full-stretched day elastic. He pulls it out until he, too, cheers some hearth and heart that would otherwise have been frozen! and the busy man is busier, indeed, but happier, and the amount of human suffering is a little less. In this light does not the hatted figure at the window become a real benefactor? Nothing, indeed, is further from its mind. It does not even see the busy citizen by whom it is seen. But Nature has attained the object for which she placed it in a club window with a hat on and sucking the head of a cane.

MR. TIBBINS'S NEW-YEAR'S CALL

R. Tibbins wishes that his experience in making New-Year's calls may be made useful as an illustration of the deceitfulness of appearances. He is one of the gentlemen who do not keep dogs, although he lives in the country, and who decline social visits to persons who do. Mr. Tibbins is, however, just and impartial. "My friends," he says, "shall not complain of any obscurity in my conduct. I simply offer them the alternative, me or your dog—not both. If your tastes and preferences are such that you will have large or small animals lying within your gates, yelping and growling at every person who enters, smelling at ankles, and producing lively apprehensions which are not in the least allayed by calling the beast a good fellow, and remarking that he was never known to bite,—if," says Mr. Tibbins to his friends, "these are your preferences, we will not quarrel. I respect your idiosyncrasies, and I beg you to respect mine, while I embrace this occasion to mention that among the most prominent of mine is an indisposition to have my ankles smelled at by dogs of any breed or of any size, whether they are good fellows or not, and an insuperable disgust with the barking of beasts when I go to make a call. That it is very selfish in you or any person to subject his friends to such ordeals I do not say; that I leave entirely to your own judgment, only remarking that although black snakes and green snakes are not venomous reptiles, and are probably 'good fellows,' I do not think that those who delight in having them coiling and gliding about their parlors ought to be vexed with their neighbors for not calling. The line must be drawn somewhere," says Mr. Tibbins; "you may not draw it until you come to snakes; I draw it at dogs."

When, therefore, you stroll about the delightful country in his neighborhood and mark the abodes of the rich and great, and say to him, "That is a charming place," Mr. Tibbins answers, "Yes, he has dogs; I never go there." Mr. Tibbins was naturally very much exhilarated by the hydrophobia excitement last summer, and hoped at one time that the public feeling might be carefully kindled to a general crusade against dogs. "I lately read in Mr. Warner's letter from the Nile," he said, "of an African king who had never seen a horse until Colonel Long came riding into his capital. Think, oh, my friend, of the happy island valley of Avillon, where never a dog barked loudly or was ever seen." Of course so severe a taste as Tibbins's in a world so largely canine produces inconvenience, as a dislike to butter in a society which holds to a natural and necessary relation between bread and butter will often expose the dissenter to difficulty. Such a man, in a crowded and elegant assembly, who at supper has incautiously bitten a heavily buttered sandwich, in the midst of a bout of badinage with youth and beauty, understands the emotion of those who, with Mr. Tibbins, dislike to have their ankles smelled at by dogs, yet who suddenly, within a neighbor's grounds and far from help, perceive that a dog is actually engaged in that office.

But Mr. Tibbins went out merrily upon New-Year's morning, resolved at least to pay one visit long neglected to a neighbor who had become his neighbor the summer before, who had given no signs of dogs, and who, as Tibbins assured himself, was much too sensible a man to allow them about the house and grounds. Our friend began the day prosperously, finding everybody cordial and gay, and doing, as he thought, his full share towards the enlivenment of each call. At last he came to the new neighbor's, and went humming gayly up the neat plank-walk from the gate, when, turning briskly around the house—putting it, as it were, between himself and retreat—he was advancing rapidly towards the front door when he suddenly stopped, with a sickening sense of betrayal, as it were, in the house of a friend, for directly before him, within easy spring, so to speak, lay a large dog upon the door-mat and directly under the bell. He was asleep, and upon perceiving him Mr. Tibbins, as if upon tiptoe for silence, reconnoitred the situation. To advance and ring the bell was simple madness, for the dog would of course awake the moment a foot struck the step, and in the confusion of sudden awakening and of close quarters with an intruder he would probably be very reckless and sanguinary, and not in the least amenable to the "good fellow" blandishment. Mr. Tibbins, therefore, without moving, looked at the windows, hoping to see somebody looking out whom he might with beaming pantomime summon to the door, and so save himself the contact which seemed to be inevitable. But there was no one looking out, and the closed windows seemed to him to stare with blank indifference, so that he says he had had before no idea how cruel windows can be. It then occurred to him that if he could open communication with the kitchen, and entice some maid or man to the door without ringing, the difficulty would disappear, because the maid or man would pacify the dog. But to reach the kitchen required a lateral movement which would leave the enemy directly across his line of retreat. Moreover, any movement whatever exposed Mr. Tibbins to the risk of making a noise, which would arouse the foe and precipitate the engagement. He therefore maintained his position, looking hopefully towards the kitchen, but, seeing no one, he reluctantly held a further counsel with himself.