Books: Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
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Jerome K. Jerome >> Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow
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There must surely be some special and secret manufactory for the
production of lodging-house ornaments. Precisely the same articles
are to be found at every lodging-house all over the kingdom, and they
are never seen anywhere else. There are the two--what do you call
them? they stand one at each end of the mantel-piece, where they are
never safe, and they are hung round with long triangular slips of
glass that clank against one another and make you nervous. In the
commoner class of rooms these works of art are supplemented by a
couple of pieces of china which might each be meant to represent a cow
sitting upon its hind legs, or a model of the temple of Diana at
Ephesus, or a dog, or anything else you like to fancy. Somewhere
about the room you come across a bilious-looking object, which at
first you take to be a lump of dough left about by one of the
children, but which on scrutiny seems to resemble an underdone cupid.
This thing the landlady calls a statue. Then there is a "sampler"
worked by some idiot related to the family, a picture of the
"Huguenots," two or three Scripture texts, and a highly framed and
glazed certificate to the effect that the father has been vaccinated,
or is an Odd Fellow, or something of that sort.
You examine these various attractions and then dismally ask what the
rent is.
"That's rather a good deal," you say on hearing the figure.
"Well, to tell you the truth," answers the landlady with a sudden
burst of candor, "I've always had" (mentioning a sum a good deal in
excess of the first-named amount), "and before that I used to have" (a
still higher figure).
What the rent of apartments must have been twenty years ago makes one
shudder to think of. Every landlady makes you feel thoroughly ashamed
of yourself by informing you, whenever the subject crops up, that she
used to get twice as much for her rooms as you are paying. Young men
lodgers of the last generation must have been of a wealthier class
than they are now, or they must have ruined themselves. I should have
had to live in an attic.
Curious, that in lodgings the rule of life is reversed. The higher
you get up in the world the lower you come down in your lodgings. On
the lodging-house ladder the poor man is at the top, the rich man
underneath. You start in the attic and work your way down to the
first floor.
A good many great men have lived in attics and some have died there.
Attics, says the dictionary, are "places where lumber is stored," and
the world has used them to store a good deal of its lumber in at one
time or another. Its preachers and painters and poets, its
deep-browed men who will find out things, its fire-eyed men who will
tell truths that no one wants to hear--these are the lumber that the
world hides away in its attics. Haydn grew up in an attic and
Chatterton starved in one. Addison and Goldsmith wrote in garrets.
Faraday and De Quincey knew them well. Dr. Johnson camped cheerfully
in them, sleeping soundly--too soundly sometimes--upon their
trundle-beds, like the sturdy old soldier of fortune that he was,
inured to hardship and all careless of himself. Dickens spent his
youth among them, Morland his old age--alas! a drunken, premature old
age. Hans Andersen, the fairy king, dreamed his sweet fancies beneath
their sloping roofs. Poor, wayward-hearted Collins leaned his head
upon their crazy tables; priggish Benjamin Franklin; Savage, the
wrong-headed, much troubled when he could afford any softer bed than a
doorstep; young Bloomfield, "Bobby" Burns, Hogarth, Watts the
engineer--the roll is endless. Ever since the habitations of men were
reared two stories high has the garret been the nursery of genius.
No one who honors the aristocracy of mind can feel ashamed of
acquaintanceship with them. Their damp-stained walls are sacred to
the memory of noble names. If all the wisdom of the world and all its
art--all the spoils that it has won from nature, all the fire that it
has snatched from heaven--were gathered together and divided into
heaps, and we could point and say, for instance, these mighty truths
were flashed forth in the brilliant _salon_ amid the ripple of light
laughter and the sparkle of bright eyes; and this deep knowledge was
dug up in the quiet study, where the bust of Pallas looks serenely
down on the leather-scented shelves; and this heap belongs to the
crowded street; and that to the daisied field--the heap that would
tower up high above the rest as a mountain above hills would be the
one at which we should look up and say: this noblest pile of
all--these glorious paintings and this wondrous music, these trumpet
words, these solemn thoughts, these daring deeds, they were forged and
fashioned amid misery and pain in the sordid squalor of the city
garret. There, from their eyries, while the world heaved and throbbed
below, the kings of men sent forth their eagle thoughts to wing their
flight through the ages. There, where the sunlight streaming through
the broken panes fell on rotting boards and crumbling walls; there,
from their lofty thrones, those rag-clothed Joves have hurled their
thunderbolts and shaken, before now, the earth to its foundations.
Huddle them up in your lumber-rooms, oh, world! Shut them fast in and
turn the key of poverty upon them. Weld close the bars, and let them
fret their hero lives away within the narrow cage. Leave them there
to starve, and rot, and die. Laugh at the frenzied beatings of their
hands against the door. Roll onward in your dust and noise and pass
them by, forgotten.
But take care lest they turn and sting you. All do not, like the
fabled phoenix, warble sweet melodies in their agony; sometimes they
spit venom--venom you must breathe whether you will or no, for you
cannot seal their mouths, though you may fetter their limbs. You can
lock the door upon them, but they burst open their shaky lattices and
call out over the house-tops so that men cannot but hear. You hounded
wild Rousseau into the meanest garret of the Rue St. Jacques and
jeered at his angry shrieks. But the thin, piping tones swelled a
hundred years later into the sullen roar of the French Revolution, and
civilization to this day is quivering to the reverberations of his
voice.
As for myself, however, I like an attic. Not to live in: as
residences they are inconvenient. There is too much getting up and
down stairs connected with them to please me. It puts one
unpleasantly in mind of the tread-mill. The form of the ceiling
offers too many facilities for bumping your head and too few for
shaving. And the note of the tomcat as he sings to his love in the
stilly night outside on the tiles becomes positively distasteful when
heard so near.
No, for living in give me a suit of rooms on the first floor of a
Piccadilly mansion (I wish somebody would!); but for thinking in let
me have an attic up ten flights of stairs in the densest quarter of
the city. I have all Herr Teufelsdrockh's affection for attics.
There is a sublimity about their loftiness. I love to "sit at ease
and look down upon the wasps' nest beneath;" to listen to the dull
murmur of the human tide ebbing and flowing ceaselessly through the
narrow streets and lanes below. How small men seem, how like a swarm
of ants sweltering in endless confusion on their tiny hill! How petty
seems the work on which they are hurrying and skurrying! How
childishly they jostle against one another and turn to snarl and
scratch! They jabber and screech and curse, but their puny voices do
not reach up here. They fret, and fume, and rage, and pant, and die;
"but I, mein Werther, sit above it all; I am alone with the stars."
The most extraordinary attic I ever came across was one a friend and I
once shared many years ago. Of all eccentrically planned things, from
Bradshaw to the maze at Hampton Court, that room was the most
eccentric. The architect who designed it must have been a genius,
though I cannot help thinking that his talents would have been better
employed in contriving puzzles than in shaping human habitations. No
figure in Euclid could give any idea of that apartment. It contained
seven corners, two of the walls sloped to a point, and the window was
just over the fireplace. The only possible position for the bedstead
was between the door and the cupboard. To get anything out of the
cupboard we had to scramble over the bed, and a large percentage of
the various commodities thus obtained was absorbed by the bedclothes.
Indeed, so many things were spilled and dropped upon the bed that
toward night-time it had become a sort of small cooperative store.
Coal was what it always had most in stock. We used to keep our coal
in the bottom part of the cupboard, and when any was wanted we had to
climb over the bed, fill a shovelful, and then crawl back. It was an
exciting moment when we reached the middle of the bed. We would hold
our breath, fix our eyes upon the shovel, and poise ourselves for the
last move. The next instant we, and the coals, and the shovel, and
the bed would be all mixed up together.
I've heard of the people going into raptures over beds of coal. We
slept in one every night and were not in the least stuck up about it.
But our attic, unique though it was, had by no means exhausted the
architect's sense of humor. The arrangement of the whole house was a
marvel of originality. All the doors opened outward, so that if any
one wanted to leave a room at the same moment that you were coming
downstairs it was unpleasant for you. There was no ground-floor--its
ground-floor belonged to a house in the next court, and the front door
opened direct upon a flight of stairs leading down to the cellar.
Visitors on entering the house would suddenly shoot past the person
who had answered the door to them and disappear down these stairs.
Those of a nervous temperament used to imagine that it was a trap laid
for them, and would shout murder as they lay on their backs at the
bottom till somebody came and picked them up.
It is a long time ago now that I last saw the inside of an attic. I
have tried various floors since but I have not found that they have
made much difference to me. Life tastes much the same, whether we
quaff it from a golden goblet or drink it out of a stone mug. The
hours come laden with the same mixture of joy and sorrow, no matter
where we wait for them. A waistcoat of broadcloth or of fustian is
alike to an aching heart, and we laugh no merrier on velvet cushions
than we did on wooden chairs. Often have I sighed in those
low-ceilinged rooms, yet disappointments have come neither less nor
lighter since I quitted them. Life works upon a compensating balance,
and the happiness we gain in one direction we lose in another. As our
means increase, so do our desires; and we ever stand midway between
the two. When we reside in an attic we enjoy a supper of fried fish
and stout. When we occupy the first floor it takes an elaborate
dinner at the Continental to give us the same amount of satisfaction.
ON DRESS AND DEPORTMENT.
They say--people who ought to be ashamed of themselves do--that the
consciousness of being well dressed imparts a blissfulness to the
human heart that religion is powerless to bestow. I am afraid these
cynical persons are sometimes correct. I know that when I was a very
young man (many, many years ago, as the story-books say) and wanted
cheering up, I used to go and dress myself in all my best clothes. If
I had been annoyed in any manner--if my washerwoman had discharged me,
for instance; or my blank-verse poem had been returned for the tenth
time, with the editor's compliments "and regrets that owing to want of
space he is unable to avail himself of kind offer;" or I had been
snubbed by the woman I loved as man never loved before--by the way,
it's really extraordinary what a variety of ways of loving there must
be. We all do it as it was never done before. I don't know how our
great-grandchildren will manage. They will have to do it on their
heads by their time if they persist in not clashing with any previous
method.
Well, as I was saying, when these unpleasant sort of things happened
and I felt crushed, I put on all my best clothes and went out. It
brought back my vanishing self-esteem. In a glossy new hat and a pair
of trousers with a fold down the front (carefully preserved by keeping
them under the bed--I don't mean on the floor, you know, but between
the bed and the mattress), I felt I was somebody and that there were
other washerwomen: ay, and even other girls to love, and who would
perhaps appreciate a clever, good-looking young fellow. I didn't
care; that was my reckless way. I would make love to other maidens.
I felt that in those clothes I could do it.
They have a wonderful deal to do with courting, clothes have. It is
half the battle. At all events, the young man thinks so, and it
generally takes him a couple of hours to get himself up for the
occasion. His first half-hour is occupied in trying to decide whether
to wear his light suit with a cane and drab billycock, or his black
tails with a chimney-pot hat and his new umbrella. He is sure to be
unfortunate in either decision. If he wears his light suit and takes
the stick it comes on to rain, and he reaches the house in a damp and
muddy condition and spends the evening trying to hide his boots. If,
on the other hand, he decides in favor of the top hat and
umbrella--nobody would ever dream of going out in a top hat without an
umbrella; it would be like letting baby (bless it!) toddle out without
its nurse. How I do hate a top hat! One lasts me a very long while,
I can tell you. I only wear it when--well, never mind when I wear it.
It lasts me a very long while. I've had my present one five years.
It was rather old-fashioned last summer, but the shape has come round
again now and I look quite stylish.
But to return to our young man and his courting. If he starts off
with the top hat and umbrella the afternoon turns out fearfully hot,
and the perspiration takes all the soap out of his mustache and
converts the beautifully arranged curl over his forehead into a limp
wisp resembling a lump of seaweed. The Fates are never favorable to
the poor wretch. If he does by any chance reach the door in proper
condition, she has gone out with her cousin and won't be back till
late.
How a young lover made ridiculous by the gawkiness of modern costume
must envy the picturesque gallants of seventy years ago! Look at them
(on the Christmas cards), with their curly hair and natty hats, their
well-shaped legs incased in smalls, their dainty Hessian boots, their
ruffling frills, their canes and dangling seals. No wonder the little
maiden in the big poke-bonnet and the light-blue sash casts down her
eyes and is completely won. Men could win hearts in clothes like
that. But what can you expect from baggy trousers and a monkeyjacket?
Clothes have more effect upon us than we imagine. Our deportment
depends upon our dress. Make a man get into seedy, worn-out rags, and
he will skulk along with his head hanging down, like a man going out
to fetch his own supper beer. But deck out the same article in
gorgeous raiment and fine linen, and he will strut down the main
thoroughfare, swinging his cane and looking at the girls as perky as a
bantam cock.
Clothes alter our very nature. A man could not help being fierce and
daring with a plume in his bonnet, a dagger in his belt, and a lot of
puffy white things all down his sleeves. But in an ulster he wants to
get behind a lamp-post and call police.
I am quite ready to admit that you can find sterling merit, honest
worth, deep affection, and all such like virtues of the
roast-beef-and-plum-pudding school as much, and perhaps more, under
broadcloth and tweed as ever existed beneath silk and velvet; but the
spirit of that knightly chivalry that "rode a tilt for lady's love"
and "fought for lady's smiles" needs the clatter of steel and the
rustle of plumes to summon it from its grave between the dusty folds
of tapestry and underneath the musty leaves of moldering chronicles.
The world must be getting old, I think; it dresses so very soberly
now. We have been through the infant period of humanity, when we used
to run about with nothing on but a long, loose robe, and liked to have
our feet bare. And then came the rough, barbaric age, the boyhood of
our race. We didn't care what we wore then, but thought it nice to
tattoo ourselves all over, and we never did our hair. And after that
the world grew into a young man and became foppish. It decked itself
in flowing curls and scarlet doublets, and went courting, and
bragging, and bouncing--making a brave show.
But all those merry, foolish days of youth are gone, and we are very
sober, very solemn--and very stupid, some say--now. The world is a
grave, middle-aged gentleman in this nineteenth century, and would be
shocked to see itself with a bit of finery on. So it dresses in black
coats and trousers, and black hats, and black boots, and, dear me, it
is such a very respectable gentleman--to think it could ever have gone
gadding about as a troubadour or a knight-errant, dressed in all those
fancy colors! Ah, well! we are more sensible in this age.
Or at least we think ourselves so. It is a general theory nowadays
that sense and dullness go together.
Goodness is another quality that always goes with blackness. Very
good people indeed, you will notice, dress altogether in black, even
to gloves and neckties, and they will probably take to black shirts
before long. Medium goods indulge in light trousers on week-days, and
some of them even go so far as to wear fancy waistcoats. On the other
hand, people who care nothing for a future state go about in light
suits; and there have been known wretches so abandoned as to wear a
white hat. Such people, however, are never spoken of in genteel
society, and perhaps I ought not to have referred to them here.
By the way, talking of light suits, have you ever noticed how people
stare at you the first time you go out in a new light suit They do
not notice it so much afterward. The population of London have got
accustomed to it by the third time you wear it. I say "you," because
I am not speaking from my own experience. I do not wear such things
at all myself. As I said, only sinful people do so.
I wish, though, it were not so, and that one could be good, and
respectable, and sensible without making one's self a guy. I look in
the glass sometimes at my two long, cylindrical bags (so picturesquely
rugged about the knees), my stand-up collar and billycock hat, and
wonder what right I have to go about making God's world hideous. Then
wild and wicked thoughts come into my heart. I don't want to be good
and respectable. (I never can be sensible, I'm told; so that don't
matter.) I want to put on lavender-colored tights, with red velvet
breeches and a green doublet slashed with yellow; to have a light-blue
silk cloak on my shoulder, and a black eagle's plume waving from my
hat, and a big sword, and a falcon, and a lance, and a prancing horse,
so that I might go about and gladden the eyes of the people. Why
should we all try to look like ants crawling over a dust-heap? Why
shouldn't we dress a little gayly? I am sure if we did we should be
happier. True, it is a little thing, but we are a little race, and
what is the use of our pretending otherwise and spoiling fun? Let
philosophers get themselves up like old crows if they like. But let
me be a butterfly.
Women, at all events, ought to dress prettily. It is their duty.
They are the flowers of the earth and were meant to show it up. We
abuse them a good deal, we men; but, goodness knows, the old world
would be dull enough without their dresses and fair faces. How they
brighten up every place they come into! What a sunny commotion
they--relations, of course---make in our dingy bachelor chambers! and
what a delightful litter their ribbons and laces, and gloves and hats,
and parasols and 'kerchiefs make! It is as if a wandering rainbow had
dropped in to pay us a visit.
It is one of the chief charms of the summer, to my mind, the way our
little maids come out in pretty colors. I like to see the pink and
blue and white glancing between the trees, dotting the green fields,
and flashing back the sunlight. You can see the bright colors such a
long way off. There are four white dresses climbing a hill in front
of my window now. I can see them distinctly, though it is three miles
away. I thought at first they were mile-stones out for a lark. It's
so nice to be able to see the darlings a long way off. Especially if
they happen to be your wife and your mother-in-law.
Talking of fields and mile-stones reminds me that I want to say, in
all seriousness, a few words about women's boots. The women of these
islands all wear boots too big for them. They can never get a boot to
fit. The bootmakers do not keep sizes small enough.
Over and over again have I known women sit down on the top rail of a
stile and declare they could not go a step further because their boots
hurt them so; and it has always been the same complaint--too big.
It is time this state of things was altered. In the name of the
husbands and fathers of England, I call upon the bootmakers to reform.
Our wives, our daughters, and our cousins are not to be lamed and
tortured with impunity. Why cannot "narrow twos" be kept more in
stock? That is the size I find most women take.
The waist-band is another item of feminine apparel that is always too
big. The dressmakers make these things so loose that the hooks and
eyes by which they are fastened burst off, every now and then, with a
report like thunder.
Why women suffer these wrongs--why they do not insist in having their
clothes made small enough for them I cannot conceive. It can hardly
be that they are disinclined to trouble themselves about matters of
mere dress, for dress is the one subject that they really do think
about. It is the only topic they ever get thoroughly interested in,
and they talk about it all day long. If you see two women together,
you may bet your bottom dollar they are discussing their own or their
friends' clothes. You notice a couple of child-like beings conversing
by a window, and you wonder what sweet, helpful words are falling from
their sainted lips. So you move nearer and then you hear one say:
"So I took in the waist-band and let out a seam, and it fits
beautifully now."
"Well," says the other, "I shall wear my plum-colored body to the
Jones', with a yellow plastron; and they've got some lovely gloves at
Puttick's, only one and eleven pence."
I went for a drive through a part of Derbyshire once with a couple of
ladies. It was a beautiful bit of country, and they enjoyed
themselves immensely. They talked dressmaking the whole time.
"Pretty view, that," I would say, waving my umbrella round. "Look at
those blue distant hills! That little white speck, nestling in the
woods, is Chatsworth, and over there--"
"Yes, very pretty indeed," one would reply. "Well, why not get a yard
of sarsenet?"
"What, and leave the skirt exactly as it is?"
"Certainly. What place d'ye call this?"
Then I would draw their attention to the fresh beauties that kept
sweeping into view, and they would glance round and say "charming,"
"sweetly pretty," and immediately go off into raptures over each
other's pocket-handkerchiefs, and mourn with one another over the
decadence of cambric frilling.
I believe if two women were cast together upon a desert island, they
would spend each day arguing the respective merits of sea-shells and
birds' eggs considered as trimmings, and would have a new fashion in
fig-leaves every month.
Very young men think a good deal about clothes, but they don't talk
about them to each other. They would not find much encouragement. A
fop is not a favorite with his own sex. Indeed, he gets a good deal
more abuse from them than is necessary. His is a harmless failing and
it soon wears out. Besides, a man who has no foppery at twenty will
be a slatternly, dirty-collar, unbrushed-coat man at forty. A little
foppishness in a young man is good; it is human. I like to see a
young cock ruffle his feathers, stretch his neck, and crow as if the
whole world belonged to him. I don't like a modest, retiring man.
Nobody does--not really, however much they may prate about modest
worth and other things they do not understand.
A meek deportment is a great mistake in the world. Uriah Heap's
father was a very poor judge of human nature, or he would not have
told his son, as he did, that people liked humbleness. There is
nothing annoys them more, as a rule. Rows are half the fun of life,
and you can't have rows with humble, meek-answering individuals. They
turn away our wrath, and that is just what we do not want. We want to
let it out. We have worked ourselves up into a state of exhilarating
fury, and then just as we are anticipating the enjoyment of a vigorous
set-to, they spoil all our plans with their exasperating humility.
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