Some day I hope to write An Historie on the Romance of Buttonholes. Buttonholes, however, are such unbodied beings and taken on the whole without their buttons, are such lonely objects that I fear lest the ambitious author should, in entertaining a morbid affinity for the Universal Desolate, fall a prey to his own affections and die of an heavenly grief. Have you never felt the pitiful sentiments put forward at the mere suggestion of the lost buttonhole? The classic illustration of this type is, of course, the one on the lapel of a coat. Perhaps the scholar will here accuse me of having incorrectly used the word buttonhole for a little slit fashioned to receive no button. In reality this is a buttonhole of many buttons. At the age when one is just too old to be spanked the aperture first becomes fully a buttonhole—it accommodates a youth with provision for his innumerable colored, enamelled buttons emblazoned with advertisements of charity drives, political campaigns, circus days, wholesale houses, and the like. The only visible regret on these occasions is that there is but one of its kind. In necessity invention presses even normal ones into service. Later on, this receptacle receives buttonhole bouquets from frail lady-fingers—fragrant forget-me-nots, spring flowers, or dainty garden nosegays. And in empty declining years it may clasp only an infrequent bachelor’s button or an onion blossom.
About two years after the father-vest-second-button age, which would land me in the father-vest-third-and-a-half-button stage, I fell to wondering about buttons in a scientific way. Buttons were awkward. The world, I knew, had been going on for hundreds of centuries and men had discovered no more graceful fashion of fastening their clothes together than by these round discs, dangling ridiculously from clothes and yet anchored there with an amount of pains out of all proportion to the achievement. Furthermore the cloth was sloppy. The combination sufficed, you may judge, to drive any young neurotic into a very unenviable state. I fell to inventing. Pins would not do (this was an instinct). Hooks and eyes were worse still (I had experienced all too intense agony at the canniness of “doing up” mother’s dress). Sewing in for the winter was obviously unchristian. In a desperate, fevered condition of mind clothes pins, railroad spikes, patent clasps, a series of bands like a Michelin man’s, box fasteners, padlocks, rings, thongs, strings, and lobster claws whirled by as a giddy panorama of substitutes, leaving me at last faint and content necessarily with the extant order of things, yet peaked at the impotency of my inventive genius. After carefully revolving the matter in my mind, picturing many modes of clothes and corresponding sorts of buttons, I finally concluded that this whole section of the world—buttons—instead of falling under the rule of science, was an art.
In this manner I became artistic—such mammoth results do transpire from buttons. Whether this be the cause, or whether the grey years are dulling with their sepulchral dust the gloss of my golden hair, I know not. But I am now largely unconscious of buttons. They are only miserable little nuisances flying off and rolling across the floor at the most inconvenient moments. They are intensely realistic. How in truth could anyone, save a fool, suck romance from their marrow? Fie upon you!—collar buttons—but tread softly,—we will not embark there. One exception only to this indifference do I know—the comfort of sitting in an easy-chair and unbuttoning a tight vest. This sensation is the most agreeable immediately after a large meal—say, an over-large meal. And however gross the indulgence, it causes buttons again to swim into my ken—this time on the side of mine enemies;—and as great ones indeed do they loom over me when I, by yielding to the order of unbuttoned vests, am constrained to think—
“... now ’tis little joy
To know I’m farther off from heaven
Than when I was a boy.”
L. HYDE.