A Town Constitutional

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Title:     A Town Constitutional
Author: Robert Cortes Holliday [More Titles by Holliday]

There is certainly no more grotesque fallacy than that humorously bigoted notion so generally entertained, particularly by our friends of other nations (at any rate, before the war), that the only thing in the world for which we as a people care is success as measured by money. A walk about any day will give this ridiculous idea a black eye. Any one with ears to his head will perceive that we scorn things which are to be had for money. Money! What is that? Phew! Everybody has it. It is mine, it is yours, it is nothing--trash. Any one with a brain-pan under his hat will recognise inside of half an hour that we are anything but a nation of shopkeepers spiritually. It is as plain as a pike-staff that we are a nation of perfectly rabid idealists. It is sounded on every side that the things which we most fervently prize, inordinately covet, envy possession of, and hold most proudly, are precisely those things which the wealth of the Indies would not procure. To wit:

Jimmy was a waiter, humble, but celebrated--as a waiter--among a circle. An admirer of Jimmy's, a journalist continually on the lookout for copy, wrote him up for the paper at space rates. Thence till the day Broadway suffered his loss by untimely death did Jimmy fold and unfold his worn clipping to exhibit with a full heart this tribute to him which was of a kind (as he never failed to say) which "money could not buy." It is reported upon reasonably reliable authority that Jimmy's last words, in a faint whisper, were: "Money could not have bought------" And then he went on his way.

So it was, too, with a tobacconist whom I knew--who had an article framed which referred to his shop. "In such a paper, too!" he exclaimed a hundred times a day, "money could not have bought it."

Your aunt has a lot of old spavined furniture which would bring about tu'pence at public sale. Some of it was your great-aunt's. All of it has been in the family from time immemorial; and its peculiar and considerable value, your aunt and her neighbours are agreed, resides in the esoteric fact that it is the kind of thing which "money couldn't buy."

Health is a great blessing, and, we are repeatedly told, we should prize it beyond measure,--as it is a thing that money will not buy.

His money, it is commonly said of a rich man in bereavement, will not bring his son back to life. The impotency of money in the life of the spirit is notorious among us. Of a deceased miser we declare with satisfaction: "Well, he can't take his money with him." And money--the righteous well know--will get none into heaven.

What is the moving theme that holds the multitude at the movie theatre bound in a spell? What is it that answers deep unto deep between the literature vended at drug stores and the people?--Concern for money overthrown by idealism! The triumph of ethereal love over the base temptation of lucre! Is it not so: the rich wooer in the top hat and the elegant Easter-parade coat is turned away, and the poor lover with his flannel shirt open at the collar and a dinner-pail hung upon his arm is chosen for bluebird happiness--and the heart of the maligned masses is satisfied.

Money (the conviction has passed into an industrious bromideum) will not buy happiness.

I knew a man who had a wife; and he was told by sage counsellors that if he would treat her right she would give him "what money could not buy."

But what need is there to multiply examples? Take a turn around the block and return with the wisdom that money can not buy. Come; get your stick and let us go.

A beneficent Providence, sir, has caused it to be that the finest shows in this world are free of all men. Nature charges no admission fee. The dawn and the evening are gratis. In the matter of art, the performances of the little men of the passing hour are to be seen in Bond Street, on the Avenue, and at the academies and societies, for a price; but those treasure houses of the enduring masterpieces, the great museums of the world, demand naught from him that hath nothing. A collector of customs sitteth at the golden door of the movies; but the far more delightful and far more human shows shown in the show windows are quite free for all to see. And to those blessed ones whose eyes have not lost their innocence and whose hearts remain sweet and simple the costly spectacles of the world are but tawdry vanity as compared with the feasts of entertainment enacted daily in show windows.

One of the very best theatres in this country for entertainments of this nature is lower Sixth Avenue, though the Bowery is not to be overlooked, and the passionate lover of pleasure should not neglect any business thoroughfare which presents a particularly shabby appearance. The actors and actresses in these fascinating histrionic presentations are not called comedians and tragedians, comediennes and tragediennes--but "demonstrators." The effect of their performances thus is twofold: they gratify the spectator's sense of the humorous or the curious, and they demonstrate to his intelligence the value of something with whose merits possibly he is not acquainted.

There are not many things in life, I think, which you find pleasanter than this: You are slightly obstructed in your perambulations on a fine afternoon by a small knot of loiterers pausing before a shop window in which an active young man of admirably mobile countenance is holding forth in dumb show. Your progress is slackened as you edge about the throng with the intention of proceeding on your way. As it were, you poise on the wing. Then, like a warming liquor stealing through the veins, the awakening of your interest in the artful antics of this young man makes fainter and fainter your will to proceed on your course, until it dies softly away. What is this ridiculous thing he is doing? By its magnetism it has, at any rate, become for you the supreme interest, for the moment, of the universe.

With a horrible grimace the young man yanks fiercely at his cravat. It does not budge, or at least only very slightly. With still further display of energetic effort, accompanied by a ferocious expression of pained and enraged exasperation, he yanks again. No, the cravat is stuck fast behind within the collar. With a gesture of hopeless despair and a face of pitiful woe the young man abandons his struggle with the ordinary kind of cravat which loops around the neck, and which, foolishly enough, is so universally worn. You see, so his eloquent flinging out of the hands saith, it is of no use. He shakes his fist. Then, registering the extremity of disgust, he rips the loathesome, cravat-clogged collar from his neck and flings it from him.

What will he do now? is the thought that holds his audience bound in a spell. Ah! His face breaks into light. He snatches up his collar and industriously adjusts it without a cravat. He picks up a small object which he holds aloft between thumb and forefinger, turning it this way and that. It is the ready-made bow of a bow tie, the bow and nothing more. Yes, there are patent prongs to it, which he deftly slips beneath the wings of his collar. So! No trouble whatever. Instantaneous. A smile of luxurious blandness spreads over the face of the young man. Thus he stands for a moment. Then stoops and places in a corner of the window a large card inscribed "Ten Cents." With a pleasing sense of curiosity satisfied, the current of your own life as distinct from show-window shows flows back again into your consciousness. You turn, and the great movement of the city takes you, although some souls of spacious leisure and of apparently insatiable curiosity linger on to drink in the happiness of witnessing a repetition of the fascinating exhibition.

Of such shows is the freedom of the kingdom of heaven. There is the other young man in a show window a bit further on who all day long gashes blocks of wood with a magic razor, only to sharpen it to greater keenness, so that before you he continually cuts with it the finest hairs. There is the young woman garbed as a nurse who treats the corns on a gigantic plaster foot. In show windows cooks are cooking appetising dishes; damsels are combing magnificent, patent-medicine grown tresses; and in show windows are spectacles of infinite variety and without number. All for the delight without cost of a penny of those whose hearts are as a little child. There is the trim maid who folds and unfolds a Davenport couch. I had a friend one time of a roving disposition (alas! he is now in jail) who once got the amazingly enviable job of doing nothing but smoke an endless succession of cigars in a show window.

Brother (as Lavengro used to say), there is nothing high about the cost of pleasure. But hold! would you, without a thought, pass by here? Though this, yon show, is without its rapt throng to do it reverence, it is, to an ardent mind, the most enticing, and the most instructive, of all the classic exhibitions to be seen from the pavement, the one fullest of all of (in the words of one Quinney) "meat and gravy." Always tarry, fellow man, before the cheap photographer's.

Any one who has ever been enough interested in human matters to examine the sidewalk exhibitions of the cheap photographer does not need to be told that the fine old star character there, a character somewhat analogous in popular appeal and his permanency as an institution to the heavy villain of melodrama, a character old as the hills, yet fresh as the morning, is the naked baby. Nobody ever saw a cheap photographer's display without its naked baby. Just why he should be naked is not clear. However, there is undoubtedly inherent in the mind of the race this instinct,--that you should begin your photographic life naked. Perhaps this is in response to a sentiment for symbol: naked came ye into the world. Perhaps it is because your face at the time of your initial photograph is as yet so uncarved by time that it is deemed more interesting to display the whole of you, clothed, as it were, in innocence. The art of painting, of course, from the earliest rendering of the Child of the Virgin down to Mary Cassatt, has been fond of portraying infants nude,--the photographer may be said only to continue a very old tradition. But painting has always observed the baby with ceremonious respect; painting stripped him to admire him and softly caress him. The broad humanity of the cheap photographer "jokes" him, as you may say.

The most popular way of presenting the baby at the cheap photographer's,--seated, standing, on his back, or on his belly; stark naked, or (as sometimes he is found) girded about the loins, or (as, again, he is seen) less naked and wearing an abbreviated shirt, and in various other stages of habilimentation,--is on a whitish hairy rug. No background but the hairy rug. It is background (very largely), one suspects, that gives one the sense of a baby's value. The idea occurs to a thoughtful observer of his photograph that it is to a considerable degree from background, surrounding atmosphere, local colour, that the baby derives personal identity. Twenty cabinet-sized naked babies, each on a hairy rug:--one conceives how an unscrupulous photographer (as may very likely commonly be the case) might save money on negatives, after he had a stock of a little variety, by snapping babies with an unloaded camera and printing from old plates, without anybody's being the wiser. (Here, indeed, would be a utilitarian motive behind the baby's being naked of articles of identification.) It is, alas! undermining to the pride of race to reflect that that photograph of one's cousin's fine new baby Edward, which reminded every one so much of the infant's mother, may not impossibly have been the original likeness of some baby now long extinct.

History, so called, deals exclusively with persons of distinction; fiction, though more catholic, sees man in a glamour, with the various prejudices this way and that of a mortal eye. The development of the discovery announced by Daguerre in 1839, and first applied to portraits by one Draper,--this is the great historian. The photograph business, sir, alone sees life steadily and sees it whole. Photography is the supreme sociologist, master psychologist. In the sidewalk display of the cheap photographer is the poor, naked, human story,--poignantly touching, chastening of pride, opening the heart of the responsive beholder to deeper knowledge of the inherent kinship of all humankind.

How does the consummate realism of the cheap photographer show its babies of yester-year, clothed now in the raiment of mature years and simple honours?

That appealing spectacle, the girl who has performed somewhere in curiously home-made-looking "tights," and, laughing roguishly at the camera, been photographed afterward (from this sight what roue would not turn away his sinful eyes in shame and pity?). The highly satisfied young man in the very rented-appearing evening clothes (photographed, it is apparent, in the day time). The blank-looking person who for some cryptic reason is enamoured of the studious, literary pose, and appears, in effect like a frontispiece portrait, glancing up from a writing table (an obviously artificial cigar between the fingers of one hand, apparently made of carbon, and, presumably, the property of the photographer). The aspiring amateur boxer, in position, with his sparing trunks on and an American flag around his waist (or sometimes, in default of trunks, he is seen in his nether undergarment). The jolly girl in boy's clothes (who has not seen her?). The little child in costume performing a cute dance. The coloured beau, a heavy swell, in spats and a van Bibber overcoat. The gay banqueters of the So-and-So Association, around their festive board (one man, devilish fellow! holding aloft a beer bottle). The young girl in confirmation attire, standing awkwardly by a table (her slip of a mind, as she stands there, very probably less upon her God than upon her common, foolish dress). The team of amateur comedians (sad spectacle!). The bride and groom (perennial as the naked baby) standing, curiously enough, upon our old friend, the hairy rug. The family group (all the figures of which have a curious wax-work effect, reminiscent of the late Eden Musee). The policeman, in uniform (sitting in a chair of cathedral architecture). The fireman (a hero, perhaps,--though no man is a hero, merely amazingly human, to the cheap photographer's camera). The youthful swains posed beside that indestructible stage property of the popular photographer, the artificial tree stump. The immortal woman vain of that part of her which Mr. Mantalini referred to as "outline," and careful to keep her near arm from obstructing the spectator's view (sometimes she is clothed; sometimes simply wound in a sheet; sometimes, in either case, she is like the Dowager whose outline Mr. Mantalini described as "dem'd"). All these--and many others--are the traditions of the cheap photography.

Nobody, apparently, is so unattractive, nobody so poor, nobody wears such queer clothes, nobody is so old, or faded, or fat, or "skinny," or short, or tall, or black, or bow-legged, or so anything at all, that he or she won't pose for a photograph. So that it may reasonably be said, that to have lost the instinct to have one's "picture taken" is to have lost the love of life. Nobody, no doubt, but is interesting to somebody. And, as Stevenson has said, can any one be regarded as useless so long as he has a friend?

And when--brother--at length, one has withdrawn forevermore from the tawdry stage of the cheap photographer's, a last view is taken of one, as it were, in the grave. Side by side at the cheap photographer's with the naked baby and with the bride and groom--is the "floral emblem."

[The end]
Robert Cortes Holliday's essay: Town Constitutional

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