MENTAL UNIFORMS.
ANEW hotel has been set up in New York, which is being run upon new lines. The proprietor is a great believer in first impressions and the value of a pleasant mental atmosphere. The manner and bearing of average American hotel employees leaves,' lie thinks, much to be desired. They are short and business-like with the guests, wholly intent upon their duties, careless who comes and who goes, wishing them neither welcome nor God-speed. All these defects this most modern innkeeper has determined to correct. In the hostelries of the past, though fewer physical comforts were to be found, an atmosphere of well-being prevailed, and that atmosphere was created by the geniality of the staff. Accordingly, all the maids and men who serve the travellers coming to the hotel have orders to smile and are drilled to do it. They rehearse the smile to be given to the parting and the coming guest, they enter each room with a smile, and ii encouraged to do so they discuss, with a smile, the weather and the crops. We hope they are well paid for all this extra trouble—for obviously they are asked to super-add the work of an actor to that of waiter or chambermaid. Perhaps their hours are not very long. Eight hours of assumed gaiety, if one had a headache or too much to do or was obsessed by any anxiety, would be about as long as one could manage. What happens, we wonder, when the respite comes ? Are all those smiling assistants known by their friends and families as specially irritable, glum, disagreeable people ? Do the less refined among them fight and assault one another after hours, or do they sink from sheer fatigue into an inert calm ? Perhaps none of these surmises is true. We are creatures of habit, and perhaps they go home and smile as constantly as when they were at work. The " merry and bright " habit may become innate, so that they never relax into temper or tears. It is not impossible that the man who invented this strange discipline may have stumbled upon a new nerve cure. New York mothers may be before long eagerly trying to " place " their daughters under this new tuition instead of sending them to rest cures, but one cannot help thinking that if the force of habit is really not exaggerated, the cure must be worse than the disease. There is a sort of dazzling light, a kind of glare about people with whom an unspontaneous habit of happiness has become inveterate, which makes one long for an umbrella or any other form of shade when one is with them. It is no doubt a habit of mind very much admired by those who have not been too much exposed to it, but after a while it is very " trying," in all senses of the word.
In the first place it is so dreadfully unbecoming. No one . else can look at his best. All the other people feel as though their troubles and worries, great and small, were showing in their plain, untrained countenances as the light of perpetual smile is turned upon them. Again, they cannot ask for any sympathy, and if they were on the point of doing so, when they perceived the stereotyped gaiety of the inter- locutor they probably hold their tongues with a painful effort. There is a strange notion abroad that religion bestows upon its votaries this cheerful mask. We have often wondered what can be the origin of the idea. We can only say, as everyone does when his neighbour's notions strike him as superstitious, we suppose the doctrine is pre- Christian. Certainly it savours of stoicism—a stoicism without its classic dignity. We all enjoy our moods to a certain extent. We enjoy their variety just as we enjoy variety in the weather, above all we like our privacy. We want sometimes to get away altogether from our fellow-creatures. Physically, we must be near them if our work takes us into their haunts, but sometimes we are glad to hide behind " a straight face," but to hide behind a smile is wretched.
This notion that a pleasant atmosphere is " good business " is very American, and one would think _twice before correcting American assertions where business is concerned. The theory of good salesmanship comes to us from New York. One would think it an unlikely idea to appeal to the English mind that a' shopkeeper can succeed by making a customer buy against his will, casting, as it were, a spell upon him, so that he imagines that the article he sees is the one that he wants. One would think that the customer who buys under these circumstances would go home and say to himself, " I must avoid that shop. I was not bullied into buying, but I was bamboozled into it. Never again !'" Obviously this is not what happens as yet, and " good salesmanship " pays. The odd thing is that no one is really taken in. The net is spread in the sight of all the birds. We know that the welcome at the hotel is a pretence, that the smiles are an innocent pretence, that the salesman is pretending in the course of his duty, yet we like it, or enough people like it, to make it worth while. Of course, it would be very unpleasant for the public if all its servants insisted on facially confiding their troubles. If every man looked black and harassed. beCause of his financial worries, and every woman showed her domestic anxieties! The public requires its servants to 'give, or appear to give, their attention to what they are doing, but there is all the difference in the world between proper demeanour and a deliberately acted part. There is something a little disagreeable in this eager throwing of gilded nets. Perhaps it is nothing but a re- action from the ostentatiously off-hand manner of the smallest officials which it has been invented to correct, but one cannot help hoping that it will remain simply an experiment and will not become general. It would be a pity that the public should come to be regarded as the prey of those who minister to its necessities. It would in the end destroy the human relations which should exist between all sorts and conditions of people and destroy them, we think, more effectually than the unpleasant, and no doubt essentially vulgar, independence ' which we all deplore.
It savours of that terrible secrecy which makes it impossible for a Western to know what an Eastern is thinking: Of course, it can never come to such a pitch as we have here suggested, because the public and its servants are all one. But however useful an outward uniform may be, all mental uniforms are objectionable. A man's manner should not be his mask. We need fewer, not more masks, and less, not more acting. The thing which really divides classes and groups of people is not circumstance, but distrust. To return to the people who are so anxious to proclaim their Christianity by an unchanging cheerfulness. If this fashion for mask-wearing became at all general among good people it would in the end be almost as bad as sanctimony. Half the old-fashioned canters meant well though they did harm, because their mental uniform made the world suspicious. There is an attraction about affectation. Like some rich food, some sentimental pictures, and some silly tunes, it delights for a moment and then produces nausea. That is why the fashions in affectation change so fast. The fop of one hoUr is the fool of the next. It is the thing in which one must never be old-fashioned. All pretence of a permanent mood is a ridiculous affectation, whether the mood be serious or gay. A new affectation is anadvertisement, and it is as difficult where the public is concerned as where an individual is concerned to tell the exact moment when it ceases to be an attraction and simply warns men off.
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