Like most practical men, I have a positive horror of appearing queer. I shun eccentricity in dress as assiduously as I shun eccentricity in manners. I sometimes envy poets and artists, not for their poetry or their art, but for that sublime egotism which enables them to take pleasure in making themselves ridiculous. This seems to me a vanity which is almost beautiful, a self-confidence which is a greater blessing than personal bravery. Many a man, otherwise not extraordinary, may prove himself a hero of physical courage when the occasion offers, but few there are who can deliberately challenge attention by their freakish appearance and go out among their fellow men with an air which seems to say, “I know I look like the devil and I am proud of it.”
Now I, Sir—I should not be proud of it. I should be miserably ashamed. And so I am ashamed when I read in my program that which brands me as a man of no taste or discrimination. I am horribly humiliated when I discover in the column of Beau Nash that I have brazenly shattered every commandment in the sartorial decalogue. I give you my word, Sir, I break into a cold perspiration whenever I recall the harrowing experience I had last Saturday-week. It so happened that when I prepared to go to the play, I found no fresh white waistcoats. This did not greatly trouble me at the time, for I am a resourceful man, and I at once recalled that I possessed a black waistcoat which my tailor had made for me at the same time he had made my dress suit. This I donned in blissful ignorance of my impending ordeal. I arrived at the theater rather late and had no opportunity of reading the program before the curtain rose. That first act is the one bright memory I have of that awful evening. I enjoyed the first act. But, Sir, I did not long remain in ignorance of my disgrace. In the first intermission my eyes were drawn by an irresistible fascination to the column headed, “What Men Wear,” and in letters which seemed fairly to jump out of the page I read, “The black waistcoat worn with evening dress is the height of vulgarity and is not tolerated.”
Sir, you can imagine with what a sudden shock my care-free contentment dropped from me. There I sat in the full glare of the electric light, conscious that I was surrounded by hundreds of men who had read that damning paragraph which stamped me as an ignorant underbred boor, who had attempted evening dress without knowing the very rudiments of the art. I cast a hasty glance about the theater, and the fleeting hope which had sprung up died within my breast. There was not another black waistcoat in sight.
How I lived through the rest of that intermission I can not say. I only know that I could feel the contemptuous eyes of the audience upon that dreadful black waistcoat, like so many hot augurs boring holes in the pit of my stomach. Hastily hiding my face behind my program, I slumped down in my seat in the vain hope of hiding my disgrace, while drops of anguish trickled down my brow and fell splashing upon the cruel words which had rendered me an object for pity and contempt. When the curtain rose upon the second act, I crept out of the auditorium under cover of the kindly darkness and slunk away home to hide my shame.
I do not think I shall ever attend the theater in this city again. In vain I argue and seek to persuade myself that what I read in the program was only the opinion of one man, and a man at that who, in all probability, never owned a dress suit in his life. Whoever he may be, whatever his knowledge or ignorance of dress may be, he writes with such a saucy assumption of omniscient authority that my reason stands abashed before his insolence. As aloof and austere as the Olympian gods, he crushes my spirit and fills my soul with humility. No, Mr. Idler, I do not believe I shall ever attend the theater here again. The mental suffering these fashion writers inflict upon me is too great a price to pay for the pleasure I extract from the drama.
I am, Sir,
Maurice Mufti.
OF LOOKING BACKWARD
To the Editor of The Idler.
Dear Sir: It is a constant source of surprise to me that men continue, at all ages but the earliest, to look back upon the past with a wistful eye, recalling, with many expressions of regret, the days that are no more. Thus, while still in the twenties, the youth begins to feel the burden of worldly cares already pressing heavily upon his shoulders and sighs when he thinks of the irresponsible school-days of his teens. At thirty, he is convinced that he has missed the best part of his youth and would fain be a youngster of twenty once more, his greatest care the sprouting down upon his upper lip. Come to forty, he is sure that he should have been most happy when thirty, over the first rawness of youth, but not yet sensible of any physical deterioration and quite unmarked by the passage of time. At fifty, he envies the lustihood of forty, and at sixty he longs for the activity and the muscular ease which he enjoyed at fifty. And so it goes on, so that we can readily imagine a patriarch of ancient days exclaiming, “Oh, if I were but two-hundred-and-twenty once more! How I should enjoy life!”