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.