To "The Man in the Mirror"

AND yet, my dear Contributor, you don’t much more than half know yourself if, as seems to be the case, you have confined your observations to the front view. I suppose we are all of us apt to be of the opinion of the little girl in Punch, who said, “But I am in front.” The person whose eyes I meet in the mirror, that is I. His are the qualities which I recognize, his the defects which I try to correct. If I do not wish others to see me exactly as I am, I control my face and think myself sufficiently disguised ; and all the time my back may be betraying me.

Certainly, if you depend to any extent on the man in the mirror for self-knowledge, it behooves you to get an all-round view. Otherwise you may be most lamentably mistaken in yourself. Take, for instance, the case .of my friend X. He is a delightful fellow, with hosts of friends. With his alert expression, his young eyes, his charming smile, you find it hard to realize that he is well along in the forties, and you feel that he must have drunk of the fountain of youth. You believe him, as he frankly believes himself, to be a generous, sympathetic sort of man, wdth a sense of humor and with energy enough to seize the opportunity of the moment. But as you get to know him well, you come across some curious contradictions in his character. At times he seems oddly cold-blooded and hard-hearted. You are surprised to find him more obstinate than you had supposed, and most of all surprised at a certain procrastination in doing the thing which he has declared to be the altogether desirable thing to do. You set down these peculiarities as strange but momentary vagaries, having nothing to do with his real character. Then some day, perhaps, you may happen to walk down a corridor behind him, with nothing to distract your attention. Heavens! you say to yourself, I did n’t know X looked like that. What you see is the back of a very settled, very opiniated middle-aged man. Suddenly you feel that you understand X as you have never understood him before. Those supposed chance vagaries fall into place as an integral part of his character. Hitherto it has always seemed odd that he should be so genuinely unconscious of his own inconsistencies. Now you see that it may well be because he only judges himself by the man in the mirror. He looks in the glass and thinks himself a dashing blade who must be held in with a tight rein, when all the time it would be quite safe to let himself go, since there are enough counteracting influences in his own nature. And so he grows, year by year, a little less worthy of the love which, after all, he is always going to get, as long as he looks at you out of those clear young eyes and greets you with that charming smile.

Women study their backs more than men and they also disguise them more. I remember a very fascinating woman once saying to me, “I would rather my back should look right than my face, for when I am face to face with a person I can take care of myself, but my back is defenseless.” Once in a while a man takes a hand-glass to study a disconcerting bald spot, and he may look to see whether his new coat fits, but I doubt whether, as a rule, he can be said to know himself from that point of view. Yet sometimes the result of such a study would be very encouraging, for we all know many persons whose backs are much more prepossessing than their faces — younger, more alert, more suggestive of beauty. Try it, dear Contributor, with the help of, say, three cheval-glasses placed at the proper angles, and you may find that modest self-confidence which you have hitherto acquired by such slow degrees, increasing by leaps and bounds.