Nevertheless, wives continued to respect their husbands in about the normal proportion. Within the relatively brief compass of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, I, who would have gone smooth-shaven in the fourteenth, could conceivably have fluttered in at least thirty-eight separate and beautiful arrangements of moustaches, beard, and whiskers. Nor, I suspect, did these arrangements always wait upon the slow processes of nature. One does not have to grow whiskers. Napoleon's youthful officers were fiercely bewhiskered, but often with the aid of helpfully adhesive gum; and in the eighteen-thirties there occurs in the Boston Transcript, as a matter of course, an advertisement of 'gentlemen's whiskers ready-made or to order.' We see in imagination a quiet corner at the whisker's, with a mirror before which the Bostonian tries on his ready-made whiskers before ordering them sent home; or again, the Bostonian in doubt, selecting now this whisker, now that from the Gentlemen's Own Whisker Book, and still with a shade of indecision on his handsome face as he holds it up to be measured. 'Perhaps, after all, those other whiskers—'
But the brisk, courteous person with the dividers and tape-measure is reassuring. 'Elegant whiskers!' he repeats at intervals. 'They will do us both credit.'
The matter has, in fact, been intelligently studied; the beautifying effect of whiskers reduced to principles. If my face is too wide, a beard lengthens it; if my face is too narrow, it expands as if by magic with the addition of what have sometimes been affectionately called 'mutton chops,' or 'siders'; if my nose projects, almost like a nose trying to escape from a face to which it has been sentenced for life, a pair of large, handsome moustaches will provide a proper entourage—a nest, so to speak, on which the nose rests contentedly, almost like a setting hen; if my nose retreats backward into my face, the æsthetic solution is obviously galways. A stout gentleman can do wonders with his appearance by adopting a pointed beard, and a suit of clothes, shirt, necktie, and stockings with pronounced vertical stripes. A thin one, on the other hand, becomes at once substantial in effect, without being gross, if he cultivates side-whiskers, and wears a suit of clothes, shirt, cravat, and stockings with pronounced horizontal stripes. If my face lacks fierceness and dynamic force, it needs a brisk, arrogant moustache; or if it has too much of these qualities, a long, sad, drooping moustache will counterbalance them. I read in my volume of Romantic Love and Personal Beauty that 'the movements of the moustache are dependent on the muscle called depressor alæ nasi. By specially cultivating this muscle, men might in course of time make the movements of the moustache subject to voluntary control.'
Just think what a capacity for emotional expression lies in such a simple organ as the dog's caudal appendage, aptly called the 'psychographic tail' by Vischer; and moustaches are double, and therefore equal to two psychographic appendages! Truly I know not of which to think first—a happy gentleman wagging his moustache or a happy dog wagging two tails. And yet here am I, shaving away the daily effort of this double psychographic appendage to become visible! One might almost think that my depressor alæ nasi was a vermiform appendix.
It has been said by some critics that whiskers are a disguise. I should be unwilling to commit myself to this belief; nor can I accept the contrary conviction that whiskers are a gift of Almighty Providence in which the Giver is so sensitively interested that to shave them off is to invite eternal punishment of a kind—and this, I think, destroys the theory—that would singe them off in about two seconds. Whiskers are real, and sometimes uncomfortably earnest; the belief that they betoken an almost brutal masculine force is visible in this, that those whose whiskers are naturally thinnest take the greatest satisfaction in possessing them—seem, in fact, to say proudly, 'These are my whiskers!' But I cannot feel that a gentleman is any more disguised by his whiskers, real, ready-made, or made to order, than he would be if he appeared naked or in a ready-made or made-to-order suit. Whiskers, in fact, are a subtle revelation of real character, whether the kind that exist as a soft, mysterious haze about the lower features or such as inspired the immortal limerick,—I quote from memory,—
There was an old man with a beard
Who said, 'I am greatly afeard
Two larks and a hen,
A jay and a wren,
Have each made a nest in my beard.'
Yet I feel also, and strongly, that the man who shaves clean stands, as it were, on his own face.
We have, indeed, but to visualize clearly the spectacle of a gentleman shaving himself and put beside it the spectacle of a gentleman starching and curling his whiskers, to see the finer personal dignity that has come with the general adoption of the razor. I am not going to attempt to describe a gentleman starching and curling his whiskers,—it would be too horrible,—but I like to dwell on the shaver. He whistles or perhaps hums. He draws hot water from the faucet—Alas, poor Edward! He makes a rich, creamy lather either in a mug or (for the sake of literary directness) on his own with a shaving-stick. He strops his razor, or perhaps selects a blade already sharpened for his convenience. He rubs in the lather. He shaves, and, as Dr. Johnson so shrewdly pointed out that night at Dr. Taylor's, 'Sir, of a thousand shavers, two do not shave so much alike as not to be distinguished.' Perhaps he cuts himself, for a clever man at self-mutilation can do it, even with a safety; but who cares? Come, Little Alum, the shaver's friend, smartly to the rescue! And then, he exercises the shaver's prerogative and powders his face.
Fortunately the process does not always go so smoothly. There are times when the Local Brotherhood of Razors have gone on strike and refuse to be stropped. There are times at which the twelve interchangeable blades are hardly better for shaving than twelve interchangeable postage-stamps. There are times when the lather might have been fairly guaranteed to dry on the face. There are times when Little Alum, the shaver's friend, might well feel the sting of his own powerlessness. But these times are the blessed cause of genial satisfaction when everything goes happily.
Truly it is worth while to grow a beard—for the sake of shaving it off. Not such a beard as one might starch and curl—but the beginnings—an obfuscation of the chin, cheeks, and upper lip—a horror of unseemly growth—a landscape of the face comparable to