BEARDS AND THEIR BEARERS.
“Now of beards there be
Such a company,
Of fashions such a throng,
That it is very hard
To treat of the beard,
Though it be ne’er so long.”
Ballad in Le Prince
d’Amour. (1650.)
Whoever invented wigs, proud as he may be of the achievement, cannot boast of the same antiquity for his fashion as that which attaches to the beard. The beard, like sewing, came in with or was a consequence of sin. With respect to sewing and sin, I have before spoken; and I will only add here, that in the most prosperous times of Puritanism, it was the fashion for Puritan ladies to wear aprons only of a green colour, that being presumedly the colour of the apron worn by Eve, whose daughters they were, and the remembrance of whose sin and the acknowledgment of their own, they perpetuated in the adopted fashion of their day.
It is confidently asserted by Dutch philosophers,—so confidently that to suppose they have not good authority for what they assert, would be very ungenerous on my part,—it is asserted then by these Hollanders that Adam was created without a beard, and that the latter appendage was suddenly conferred on his chin on the very evening of the day that he had been such a “beast” as to allow himself to be beguiled into rebellion by his wife. He was consequently so far changed into the similitude of a beast, being rendered most like the goat, who is an impostor in his way, wearing as he does the grave airs of a judge, and yet being given to very frolicsome indulgences, in which judges should not, though they often do, indulge.
If this be fact, one may wonder why Eve and her daughters generally escaped this badge of opprobrium. It was perhaps on the principle according to which we punish the receiver more than the thief. If there were no receivers there would be less pilferers; and though Eve offered the temptation, if Adam had only resisted it, the consequences would have been confined within their original narrow limits, and Mr. Mechi’s razor-strops would have been without a market.
Van Helmont, in support of this theory, asks us if we ever saw a good angel with a beard;—one of those questions which are supposed by those who put them to determine a dispute at once. He falls to another conclusion thereupon; and maintains that if good angels do not wear beards, the men who do are guilty of profanity, and love goats rather than godliness. Van Helmont himself was extremely perplexed by the Jesuit casuists, who wrote on the lawfulness of beards, and who most lucidly proved, under three heads,—1st, That we are bound to shave the beard; 2nd, That we are bound to let it grow; and 3rd, That we may do either the one or the other.
St. François de Sales, the gentleman saint, was less perplexing when, on being asked by a lady whether she might not rouge, smiled, and answered, certainly, if she only painted one cheek.
Van Helmont hit the happy medium left by the Jesuitical argument, and, shaving his beard, only cultivated his mustachios.
Southey is rather inclined to accept the Dutch account of the derivation of beards, based as it is on the certainty that no man ever saw a good angel wearing one; “for,” says he, “take the most beautiful angel that ever painter designed or engraver copied, put him on a beard, and the celestial character will be so entirely destroyed, that the simple appendage of a tail will cacodæmonize the Eudæmon.” So it may be said, that a monk with a fine polished bald head is hedged with a sort of divinity, and looks altogether reverend; but only sprinkle powder from a dredging-box upon the baldness, and you make him, if not ridiculous, certainly mundane.
The English clergy do not appear to have estimated beards by Van Helmont’s scale. One of the body, in the reign of Elizabeth, cherished his beard as an incentive to righteousness. “He wore it,” he said, “to remind him that no act of his life should be unworthy of the gravity of his appearance.” This good gentleman’s beard assuredly did not deserve what Shakspeare affirms some men’s do, namely, “not so honourable a grave as to stuff a botcher’s cushion, or to be entombed in an ass’s pack-saddle.” Henry VIII. on the other hand, would not tolerate monitorism even from his own beard, and he accordingly and characteristically cut it short. Perhaps this monarch wished also to have it out of the way of petitioners; for stroking the beard, in sign of supplication for mercy, was for thousands of years a recognized fashion, as may be seen in the Classics, and in Shakspeare, passim. It will be remembered that Hudibras stroked his own beard before he proceeded to “honour the shadow” of the lady’s shoe-tie. This act has been editorially declared to have been done as in sign of asking for her favour; from the recollection, I suppose, of Thetis “palming” the chin of Jupiter; but I think it was merely a piece of gallantry, “dressing” as it were, for the occasion, as in Congreve’s ‘Way of the World,’ wherein it is said, “The gentlemen wait but to comb, Madam, and will wait on you.” Formerly, no gallant ascended to a lady’s boudoir without first combing his peruke at the foot of the stairs, and assuring himself, by a glance at his pocket mirror, that he was as well-looking a fop as ever wasted morning in talking nonsense to a speaking and painted doll.
To pull another person’s beard, was to inflict on the wearer the most degrading insult that could be thought of. When the Jew, who hated and feared the living Cid Rui Dios, heard that the great Spaniard was dead, he contrived to get into the room where the body lay, and he indulged his revengeful spirit by contemptuously plucking at the beard. But the “son of somebody” (the hidalgo) was plucked temporarily into life and indignation by the outrage; and starting half up, endeavoured to get at his sword,—an attempt which killed the Jew by the mere fright which it caused.
To shave a Moslem’s beard was once a penalty as terrible as to a Chinese the cutting off of his extended tail; and Christian princes have so esteemed the appendage, that they have pawned the beard, or a portion of it, for money lent, and redeemed the sacred pledge punctually at the promised hour. They would have forfeited all claim to be honoured of men, or rewarded of God, had they failed in their contract. In modern times they pledge only their words; and as words are of less value than beards, they are not so careful about the redemption thereof. That terribly mendacious personage, the Czar Nicholas, has, at all events, made his “parole de gentleman” to be synonymous with deliberate falsehood.
The beard however was long a cherished ornament of Russian chins, and the Czar Peter was accused of profanity against that orthodoxy which so distinguishes his successors by abolishing them. He certainly abolished the huge and spreading honours of the Muscovite jaws by a rough process. Taxes were laid upon them, which had their weight upon every hair; and when the recalcitrant were encountered in the street, they were seized, and their beards either torn from them, or shaved off with an oyster-knife, whereby half the chin went with the entire beard. The loyal nobility compromised the matter by preserving their beards in their cabinets, to be buried with them. They conjectured that the angels would neither know nor welcome them if they presented themselves at Heaven’s gate with clean chins: they thought more of these than of clean souls.
Taylor, the water poet, catalogues in rough rhymes the various fashions after which beards were worn. They are too tedious to enumerate, and yet do not enumerate every fashion; for omission is made of the fact that it was once the very “sweetest” mode to wear strings to the beard, as Jack the highwayman did to the knees of his breeches, and the Kings of Persia, who interwove their beards with gold thread. The “cane-coloured” beard was always held as detestable, that hue having been, according to tradition, that of the beard of the traitor Judas. The famous Count Brühl, who lost Saxony but preserved a collection of wigs, was more practical than the Water Poet. His wig museum not only contained every variety, but they were chronologically arranged, from the days of Aaron to those of the Count’s own time. I may add, that I have never heard of the beard being held in dishonour except among the Chaymas, in South America, who have a great antipathy against it.
Apollo and Mercury are the only deities of olden times who are represented beardless. When professional barbers first arose it would be difficult to say; Rome got hers from where she procured her cooks—Sicily; but the Eternal City was four centuries and a half old before the chins of her sons were submitted to the handling of mercenaries. Scipio Africanus, despite the turmoil of battles, found time to shave every day; and he was the first Roman who did so. Had the Senate followed the same fashion, the invading Gaul would not have found a beard to pluck, and perhaps the city might have been saved. The old Persians were very obstinate in this respect; and they and the Tartars waged bloody wars, and spilled oceans of blood in no better quarrel than the fashion of the beard. These heathens were almost as wicked as the Christian inhabitants of the adjacent towns of Bouvignes and Dinant, in Flanders. The people of both localities manufactured copper kettles, and each declared that the other’s ware was made after a sorry fashion. The animosity thus created led to bloody and long-continued feuds; but peace was happily restored by the time that other towns had applied themselves to the manufacture, and this gave the old antagonists the more leisure to ruminate upon their own folly.
When Alexander ordered the Macedonian soldiers to shave, lest their beards should be handles whereby their enemies might capture them, smooth chins become a universal Greek fashion. It so continued to the reign of Justinian, but when the Turks took Byzantium, they would allow of beards only on the chins of the conquerors; and the Normans treated the Anglo-Saxons according to the same rule. Subsequently, in the year 1200, the Council of Lateran swept off the beards of the monks, “lest in the ceremony of receiving the sacrament, the beard might touch the bread and wine, or crumbs and drops fall and stick upon it.” The monks then were, like the Emperors, utraquists. Of course dispensation was to be obtained by paying for it, and it was probably therefore that the decree was issued; but some wore their beards, in despite of the Church and her chancery, for the same reason that Fitzherbert Longbeard did in the Norman times, to show his independence of all superiors and their orders.
If there has really been wisdom in the wig, there has been wit in the beard, or its owner. More, on the scaffold, put it out of reach of the axe, because, as he said, it had committed no treason. Raleigh, when visited by the barber of the Tower, declined to have his beard trimmed, on the ground that there was a lawsuit pending about it, between him and the King, and he would not lay out any capital on it till the cause had been decided.
Raleigh’s wit reminds me of something still more witty, and quite as germane to the subject.
A few years prior to the Revolution, the witty but rather too fiery Linguet was committed to the Bastille. It is seldom that confinement calms the bile of the confined; and accordingly Linguet, the next morning, was engaged in writing ab irato an article against his incarcerators; when he was interrupted by the entrance into his room of a tall, thin, pale, personage, whose appearance very much displeased the celebrated advocate.
“What is your business?” said the latter, in a marked tone of ill-humour.
“Sir,” answered the other, “I come—”
“I see you are come!” interrupted the impatient lawyer, “but you are not wel-come.”
“Possibly, Sir; but I am the Bastille barber, and I have come—”
Here the Figaro of state-prisoners burst into a laugh, and rubbing his chin significantly with his hand, exclaimed, “Ho! ho! my good Sir, that is a different matter; puisque vous êtes le barbier de la Bastille, rasez-la;” and after so capital a pun, he addressed himself in better humour to the cutting up of his adversaries.
The last barber who held something more than barber’s office under a Christian king was Olivier le Dain, the familiar of Louis XI. In Persia, it has been common for the monarch’s barber to be a prince over the people. The Khasterash, or “personal shaver,” is reverenced by all inferior citizens; and they see nothing incongruous in the fact that a palace and slaves are part of the rewards of a man who makes of the beard of the Shah an eighth wonder of the world. The beard, in fact, has ever been held in reverential regard by all Moslems, for the reason that their prophet never allowed instrument to diminish his own. An Arab would be as much horror-stricken now as ever Lacedemonian fugitive was of old, if in punishment for offence he were condemned to lose, by shaving, the half of his beard. He would infinitely prefer to lose half his family.
The wit of Linguet, mentioned above, recalls to my memory a trait of a Duc de Brissac. This nobleman was frequently heard saying, as he was at his matutinal toilet, and was about to raise his razor to the surface of his ducal chin:—“Now then, Timoléon de Cossé, God hath made thee a gentleman, and the King hath made thee a duke; nevertheless, it is right and proper that thou shouldst have something to do—therefore thou shalt shave thyself.” I may add that it was the fashion of the De Cossés to have one general Christian name; and I think it is Bungener who remarks, in his ‘Julian,’ that on a gentleman of this house being brought before the revolutionary tribunal, and asked what his baptismal name was, he answered indignantly, “Am I not a De Cossé? and what should my Christian name be but Timoléon?”—and he added an exclamatory “de par Dieu!” to show that though he was in danger of death, he could swear as recklessly as though he had still been in the galleries of Versailles.
I have said that philosophers have not disdained to write upon the beard, and I may be honestly proud of an opportunity to follow in the wake of the philosophers. Chrysippus has chronologized its history, and it is from him we know that it was not before the reign of Alexander that shaving became a fashion in the East. Timotheus, that renowned musician, long stuck to the olden mode, and played the flute in a beard as long as his instrument, πώγωνα μέγαν ἔχων ηὔλει: and how sweetly does that last word interpret the flute’s sweet sound—ηὔλει! it dies away like a cadence beneath the lips of as great a flutist as Timotheus, our own modest and able Richardson.
The first man who shaved himself at Athens acquired a name by the act. He was called Korses, the shaven, or clipped. Diogenes despised fashion, and therefore kept his beard. Not only that; he abused all who dispensed with it. “Ah!” he exclaimed with that mouth which lay behind a portion of his own hirsute dirtiness,—for Diogenes had a contempt for soap;—“Ah!” cried he, on encountering a friend newly mown, “art thou inclined then to reproach Nature? Wouldst thou insinuate that she had done better to have made thee a woman rather than a man?”
At Rhodes all shaving was forbidden; but the Rhodians loved to display their independence of the law, and every man did what seemed best to his own chin. The same unruly sort of liberty was taken by the Byzantine barbers. The law expressly denounced razors, but scissors were tolerated. Clipping was permitted, but shaving was pronounced irreligious. Some priests shaved in spite of the decree. It was made a diocesan-court matter of; and the chief pontiff, a sort of bishop in his way, rendered an admirable judgement on the occasion. He regretted his limited powers, but he said his course was clear. Scissors were lawful, razors illegal; but the priests had first used the former, and the law did not say that razors should not be used after the scissors had been applied. For his own part, he did not well know which to adopt; but he thought his reverend gentlemen would be justified in keeping razors, but not in using them—themselves. They might shave each other! One poor priest inquired what he was required to do, seeing that he had no beard. “Oh,” said Λονδονικός, “in this case I have no doubt. The use of scissors is imperative; and if you do not obey the law, I will clap you into the Ecclesiastical Court.”
The Mahometans are very superstitious touching the beard. They bury the hairs which come off in combing it, and break them first, because they believe that angels have charge of every hair, and that they gain them their dismissal by breaking it. Selim I. was the first Sultan who shaved his beard, contrary to the law of the Koran. “I do it,” said he apologetically to the scandalized and orthodox mufti, “to prevent my vizier leading me by it.” He cared less for it than some of our ancestors, two centuries ago, did for their own. They used to wear pasteboard covers over them in the night, lest they should turn upon them and rumple them in their sleep!
The famous Raskolniki schismatics had a similar superstition to the Mahometan one mentioned above. They considered the divine image in man to reside in the beard.
Not only have the shavers of barbaric kings been accounted superior to the Prime Minister, as in our own country French coiffeurs are infinitely better paid than English curates; so to be shaved by a Prince is to be exalted to ecstatic honours. Hoskins, the traveller, was so operated on by the heir apparent of the Shaghes. His royal highness used a threepenny razor, and at every stroke carried away as much chin as beard; the honour was too much for the traveller, especially when it was cut out with a blunt razor.
Rogers is said to have once asked Talleyrand if Napoleon shaved himself. “Yes,” said the latter; “one who is born to be a king has some one to shave him, but they who acquire kingdoms shave themselves.” He might have added, “And the people too, pretty closely!”
But I am pulling the beard to a greater extent than my readers’ patience will be inclined to bear with it. I have only to add, that the beard was a symbol of bravery as well as of wisdom; and he who had a good one on his chin was usually able to grasp a sword to some purpose in his hand. Let us therefore draw the sword too, and see what can be made of it.