For instance, go into Weber & Fields when both Lillian Russell and Fay Templeton are on the bill. The former delights the eye and ear, for she is beautiful with a charming voice. Yet Miss Templeton gets beyond the eye and ear to the heart; she takes possession of the company as well as of the audience; even the “chorus”—and the chorus is noted for paying no attention to anything or anybody but itself and its personal friends—loves Fay Templeton and manifests close interest in her work.
But one need not be on the stage to study human nature. Wherever there is a successful business organization, there you will find close observers of human nature. Go into a great hotel—the Astoria for instance—and even the bell-boys are adepts to it. Walk down the lobby, supposing yourself unobserved, and you are “sized up” at once. If you are a reporter, the whole house from the bell-boys to the head clerk know that you are not of a class that can be “pigeon-holed.” The Southern man, with his family on a pleasure jaunt, is accurately “tabbed” at once. So is the public man—not always by his clothes, but by his manner. The “drummer” signifies his business by a side-to-side movement, something like a wheat-hopper in an elevator. The prominent man betrays himself by using his legs as if they were intended solely to hold up his body, which, no matter how well off he may be, is almost sure to have an empty buttonhole somewhere. The needy man is likely to be carefully clad, but his trousers are out of season, a trifle short and pieced out with gaiters. The hotel clerk takes in all these signs at a glance, and gives answers and rooms accordingly.
“The needy man is likely to be carefully clad.”
I believe many men size up people by resemblances to animals; I know I do, and with uniform success—when I select the right animal; so my mind contains a menagerie of acquaintances and a few strangers not yet identified. It is almost impossible to see a man with a fox-face without finding him foxy. Then there are monkey faces, with eyes close together and shifty—eyes that seem to look into each other. Beware of them! I have heard good housekeepers say that they prefer servants with eyes wide apart, for the other kind have invariably been connected with missing silver and other portable property. Nearly every criminal whose portrait appears in the “Rogues’ Gallery” has monkey eyes; the criminal class is recruited from this type.
The bulldog face may be seen every day among the never-give-up men in every business. The late William M. Evarts’ face suggested the eagle, and he made some great fights side by side with our national bird. What is the matter with Joseph H. Choate as the owl, the late Recorder Smyth as the hawk, Dr. Parkhurst as the wary tabby on watch for the mouse? We have some orators who look like pug-dogs; preachers who resemble fashionably sheared poodles, and I know one unmistakable Dachshund of the pulpit. Strong combinations are occasionally seen; Roger A. Pryor suggests a clean-cut greyhound with the face of a mastiff. Other men resemble great-hearted St. Bernards, with intelligent eyes and a reserve force that is never squandered on trifles or bickerings. Daily, one may see a man in a carriage with his dog, and the two look so alike that you hesitate to say which dog is driving.
The first thing apt to be noticed about a man is his hat; then his shoes, collar and clothes in the order named; the face is generally left to the last, though it should be the first. Nothing is so significant to me as the eye, especially if it won’t look straight at me. Some men of great mental vitality carry so much strength focalized in the eye that they absolutely absorb. After an earnest conversation with such a person one feels as if he had done a day’s work.
“You hesitate to say which dog is driving.”