It seems to be the prerogative of some self-made men not only to boast of themselves, their wives, their sons, their daughters, their houses, their horses--everything!--but to decry all methods of achievement not their own, and all successes not won by their methods. These are the self-made men who bring into disrepute all the grandeur and glorious achievement of their kind. Why must they spoil it? I implore them to a.s.sume a virtue if they have it not. I beg them, with all their getting, to get understanding. And if they will not open their eyes and see the anguish they are causing, if they cannot detect the fixed smile of polite endurance on the tired faces of their patient women friends, there will come a day, and we can already see its faint glimmering in the East, when we shall not care whether they are self-made, and we could even live through it if they were not made at all.
THE DYSPEPTIC
The dyspeptic generally wants to tell you all about it. That is a bore to begin with; for n.o.body in the world wants to hear anybody in the world tell all about anything in the world. Oh, those wearisome, breathless people, who insist upon giving you the tiresome details of insipid trivialities! There is no escape from them; they are everywhere. They are to be found on farms, in mining-camps, in women"s clubs, in churches, jails, and lunatic asylums, and the nearest approach to a release from them is to be fashionable, for in society n.o.body ever is allowed to finish a sentence.
This sort of a bore can only be explained on the microbe theory. None other can account for its universality. You can carry contagion of it in your clothes and inoculate a person of weak mental const.i.tution, who is of a build to take anything, until, in a fortnight, he or she will be a hopeless slave to the tell-all-about-everything habit. There is nothing like the pleasing swiftness of some of our modern diseases about it--such as heart failure, which nips you off painlessly. It is rather like the old-fashioned New England consumption, which gives you a hectic flush and an irritating hack, but which you can thrive on for fifty years and then die of something else.
I never heard of a yacht which did not carry at least one of this particular breed of bores upon every trip. I never heard of a private-car party which was free from it. Or, if you do not carry them with you, you meet them on the way, and they ruin the sunset for the whole party.
Something ought to be done about it. There ought to be a poll-tax on bores. Mothers ought to train their children to avoid lying and boring people with equal earnestness. Infirmaries should be established for the purpose of making the stupid interesting, or cla.s.ses organized on "How to be Brief," or on "The Art of Relating Salient Points," or on "The Best Method of Skipping the Unessentials in Conversation."
_I_ would go, for one.
I quite envy a man who is an acknowledged bore. He is so free from responsibility. _He_ does not care that the conversation dies every time he shows his face. He is used to it. It is nothing to him that clever men and women ache audibly in his presence. _He_ has no reputation to lose. The hostess is not a friend of his, for whom he feels that he must exert himself. A bore _has_ no friends. He is a social leech.
It implies, first of all, a superb conceit to think anybody wishes one to tell all about anything, but conceit is a natural attribute--a twin brother of its sister, vanity--and everybody has it to a greater or less degree. Indeed, the cleverest man I know--quite the cleverest--is one who always panders to this particular foible because he recognizes its universality. He has a country-house, which is always full of guests, with a great many girls among them. Every afternoon, when he drives out from town, his first sentence is, "Now come, children, and tell me all about everything. Who has been here, and what they said, and what you thought, and everything that has happened, including all that is going to happen. Don"t skip a word."
See the base flattery of that! Is it any wonder that his house is always full? What bores he would be responsible for making if we were stupid enough to do as he asks! The chief reason people do not is that ten people cannot tell all they know about everything, even if they want to. He is only furnished with two ears.
The dyspeptic is one who makes the most valiant effort to try. His dyspepsia is the most important issue of the world with him, and he _will_ talk about it. He cannot keep still and let other people enjoy their sound digestion and healthful sleep. He will not even let other people eat in peace. When he refuses a dish at table he must needs tell you why--just as if you cared!
"Have some coffee, Mr. Bore?"
"No, I thank you, Madame Sans-Gene. I like coffee, but it doesn"t like me!"
Irritating, maddeningly reiterated words--the trade-mark of the dyspeptic bore! I feel like saying, "I agree with the coffee. _I_ don"t like you either!"
A dyspeptic disagrees with me as religiously as if I had eaten him.
No wonder a man is ill who never thinks or talks of anything but the seat of his ailment, for talk about it he will, and tell you that he cannot eat hot breads or pastry or griddle-cakes or waffles. And if any of those adorable things which your soul loves are on the table, he will sit and watch you eat them, with his hand on his own pulse, and will entertain you with cheerful statements of how he would be feeling if _he_ were eating any of the deadly poisons, until it nearly gives you indigestion to hear him describe it.
I dare say I know plenty of women dyspeptics, as long as dyspepsia is said to be our national ailment, but if I do I never hear them talk about it.
Of course every woman knows that a sick man is sicker than a thousand sick women, each of whom is twice as sick as he is. We all know that he can groan louder and roll his eyes higher and keep more people flying about, and all this with just a plain pain, than his wife would do with seven fatal ailments. Then to hear him tell about it, after he has recovered, is to imagine that he is Lazarus over again, and that the day of miracles has returned, that he ever lived to tell the tale.
All this refers to an acute attack. But when his trouble is chronic, and it has to do, like dyspepsia, with a man"s eating!--you cannot escape. He _will_ tell you all about it.
In the first place, dyspepsia is such a refined and lady-like trouble.
It has no disgusting details. You can refer to it at all times without fear of nauseating your hearers. In the second place, you can count on nearly half of your hearers having it too, as dyspepsia is almost as catching as Christian Science.
Carlyle was the most famous of dyspeptics. But magnificent as he was in his growling, I fancy it is more bearable to read about it than it was for that adorable wife of his to hear him talk about it. How well we can imagine her feelings when she wrote, "The amount of bile that he brings home is awfully grand."
But one forgives much of his dyspeptic talk, and even allows the mantle of one"s Christian charity to cover the sins of lesser bile-cursed men to hear how he sums up the subject:
"With stupidity and sound digestion, man may front much. But what, in these dull, unimaginative days, are the terrors of conscience to the diseases of the liver? Not on morality, but on cookery, let us build our stronghold. There, brandishing our frying-pan as censer, let us offer sweet incense to the devil and live at ease on the fat things he has provided for his elect."
I really do feel sorry for dyspeptics when I read a thing like that. I am not heartless. It must be a sad thing not to be able to eat lobster and ice-cream together, and to have to say "No" to broiled mushrooms, and not to dare to eat Welsh-rarebits after the theatre, and to have to lock up your chafing-dish. But I do say this: unless a man can talk of his trouble as cleverly as Carlyle--and some of the choice dyspeptics I know can almost do that--I want them not to talk at all.
If they suffer, let them do it in silence. If they die, let them die entertainingly, or else, I say, don"t die in public.
I never see a dyspeptic with his little pair of silver scales on the table, weighing out two ounces of meat, or one ounce of bread, and looking like a death"s-head at a feast, and talking like a grave-digger with Yorick"s skull for a theme, that I do not think of this:
"Fantastic tricks enough man has played in his time; has fancied himself to be most things, even down to an animated heap of gla.s.s; but to fancy himself a dead iron balance for weighing pains and pleasures on was reserved for this, his latter era."
THE TOO-ACCURATE MAN
Women often complain that men in society will not return measure for measure in conversation, but stalk about dumb and unanswering, leaving women gasping from the fatigue of entertaining them.
But I am on the side of the men. I always am. They are a misjudged and maligned set. I approve of men keeping silence when they have nothing to say. It shows that they recognize their limitations and refuse to rush in where angels fear to tread.
Is not a wise silence sometimes to be preferred to the wisest speech?
Is there not often a finer eloquence in an answering silence than the cleverest words could express?
A man who talks constantly has a thousand ways always at hand in which to make a fool of himself. A silent man has but one, and even then there are always those who insist upon thinking that he is silent because of his wisdom, and not from lack of it, although Eliza Leslie says, "We cannot help thinking that when a head is full of ideas some of them must involuntarily ooze out."
But as a stimulus to conversation, an intelligently silent man is as instantaneous in his effect as music or eating. Men have become famous as conversationists who only sat and looked admiringly at vivacious women. It is a rare accomplishment, that of wise silence. It is more of a delicate compliment, more condensed and boiled-down flattery, more scent of incense than the most fulsome speech. And if one"s victim is rather a voluble talker, with a reputation for wit, a man need never rack his brains beforehand, wondering what to say, or how he can keep up with her. Let him listen to her, with his metaphorical mouth open in wrapt admiration, and she is his.
Silence is a weapon. It is a powerful corrective when used against a silent person, who then sees himself as others see him. It is a defence, used against the indiscreet, and in the hands of wise men it is a suit of armor. Silence is never dangerous, unless, like a gun, in the hands of a fool. How, then, can women complain of silent men, unless they mean fools, and if they do, why not say so, and fortify their drawing-rooms with music-boxes or magic lanterns?
But anything so negatively unhappy as silence is the least of one"s bores. One is seldom annoyed by the persistence of a silent man, for silence often means shyness; therefore it is in our power to curtail his usefulness. But, on the other hand, take a type of the talkative man, the literal, too-accurate man, who insists upon finishing his sentences, and who will stop to dot his i"s and to cross his t"s, and whose dates are of more moment than his soul"s salvation--can anything be done for _him_?
"Avoid giving invitations to bores," says a clever woman, "they will come without."
Alas, how true! The too-accurate man is ubiquitous. If you hear of him, and refuse to meet him, it is only to find that he has married your best friend, whom worlds could not bribe you to give up. If you weed him out of your acquaintance, it is only to realize that he was born into your relationship a generation ago, before you could prevent it. Sometimes he is your father, sometimes your brother. Both of these, however, can be lived down. But occasionally you discover that, in a moment of frenzy, you have married him! Heaven help you then, for "marriage stays with one like a murder!"
Imagine living all one"s life with a man who relates thus the trivial incident of having walked with a friend up Broadway last Thursday afternoon, when he met two little boys about ten years old who asked him to buy a paper:
"Last week--Thursday, I think it was, though perhaps it was Friday, or, maybe, Sat.u.r.day. Let me see: when did I leave my office early? It must have been Thursday, because Friday I stayed later than usual.
Yes, it _was_ Thursday. It was about four o"clock, perhaps a little later--a quarter after four, or maybe half-past, but I hardly think it could have been as late as that. I think it was nearer four than half-past. Anyway, I was walking up Broadway with a man by the name of Bigelow. Bigelow? Bigelow? Was that his name? It commenced with B, and had two syllables. Boswell? Blackwell? Blayney? What _was_ that fellow"s name? I never can tell a story unless I get the man"s name right. Bilton? Bashforth? Buckby? No, not Buckby, but that sounds like it. Buckley? That"s it. That was his name! I knew I"d get it. Well, I was walking up Broadway with Buckley, and at about Thirty-fourth Street--Wait a moment--_was_ it Thirty-fourth Street? It couldn"t have been that far up. About Thirty-second Street, I think. I don"t quite remember whether we had pa.s.sed the Imperial or not. But it was within a block of it, anyway, when we met two little boys about ten years old--perhaps one was a little older; one looked about ten, and the other about eleven, or perhaps even twelve, although I think ten would come nearer to it--and they asked us in a tone between a whine and a cry--the word whimper more nearly describes it--if we would buy either a _Sun_ or a _World_--I"ve forgotten which."
Delectable as honesty is in a bank clerk, or would be in a lawyer, one yearns for a little less accuracy in the moral makeup of the too-accurate man; for a little of the celestial leaven of exaggeration in the dusty dryness of his dead-level garrulousness. What difference does it make whether the Revolutionary War took place before or after the discovery of America, as long as you make your war anecdote interesting? Who cares whether Napoleon or Wellington came out ahead at Waterloo, as long as your listener is kept awake by your recital?
I related a sprightly incident only last night about a watch which Francis the Second gave to Mary Stuart, only with my usual airy touch I said Francis the Second gave it to Marie Antoinette! What difference does it make? They were both Marys, and they are both dead.
A most unpleasant old party corrected me, and added: "Francis died about two hundred years before Marie Antoinette was born."
"Then all the more of a compliment that he should have given her the watch!" I said. And I fancy I had him there.
That is the sort of man who interrupts his wife"s dinner-stories all the way through with, "1812, my dear"; "Ouida, not Emerson"; "Herod, not Homer"; until _I_ shouldn"t be surprised to see her throw a plate at his head. Oh, isn"t it fine that one does not dare to do all the things one feels like doing in society?
There is only one way to get even with the too-accurate man, and that is, when he has finished his most exciting story, to say, "And then what happened next?"
Accuracy is almost fatal to a flow of spirits. If one is obliged to weigh one"s words, one may live to be called a worthy old soul, but one will not be in demand at dinner-parties.
The too-accurate man need not pride himself upon his honesty above his fellow-men. Oftenest he is to be found paying lithe of mint, anise, and c.u.min, and neglecting the weightier matters of the law--justice, mercy, and truth. He strains at a gnat and swallows a camel. He is not more trustworthy than the man whose conversation is embellished with hyperbole, because he at least has the wit to discriminate, and the too-accurate man is only stupid.
In essentials, the man who decorates his conversation with mild but pleasing patterns of that style of statement made famous by one Ananias, is to be depended upon quite as surely as the man who takes all the sunshine from the day, and leads one"s thoughts to dwell on high, by spending ten minutes trying to recall whether he dropped that stone on his foot before or after dinner. He, and not your own evil nature, should be responsible for your instinctive wish that he had happened to be toying with a bowlder instead of a small stone which could only mutilate.
The painful accuracy which makes some men such deadly bores is a form of monomania. It is the same sort of trouble which afflicts a kleptomaniac. She will steal the veriest trash, just so she can be stealing. He h.o.a.rds the most useless trifles until his mind is nothing but a garret filled with isolated bits of rubbish that n.o.body wants to hear, unless one has an essay to write; and even then it is easier to consult the encyclopaedia.