Beard

BEARD, in modern usage, applies to the hair grown upon a man's chin and cheek. When the chin is shaven, what remains upon the cheeks is called whiskers. "Moustache" or "moustaches" describes the hair upon the upper lip. But the words have in the past had less exact meaning. Beard has stood alone for all these things, and whisker has in its time signified what we now call moustache, as in the case of Robinson Crusoe's great pair of "Turkish whiskers." The bearded races of mankind have ever held the beard in high honour. It is the sign of full manhood ; the lad or the eunuch is beardless, and the bearded woman is reckoned a witch, a loath some thing to all ages. Also the beard shrinks from the profane hand ; the future King John gave deadly offence to the chieftains, when visiting Ireland in 1185, by plucking at their flowing beards. David's ambassadors had their beards despitefully shaven by a bold heathen. Their own king mercifully covered their shame— "Tarry ye at Jericho until your beards be grown"—but the war answered the insult. The oath on the beard is as old as history, and we have an echo of it in the first English political ballad when Sir Simon de Montfort swears "by his chin" revenge on Warenne.

Adam, the primal man, was by tradition created with a beard. Zeus Allf ather is bearded, and the old painters and carvers who hardily pictured the first person of the Trinity gave Him the long beard of his fatherhood. The race-fathers have it and the ancient heroes. Abraham and Agamemnon, Woden and King Arthur and Charlemagne, must all be bearded in our pictures. With the Mo hammedan peoples the beard as worn by an unshaven prophet has ever been in high renown. But before Mohammed's day, kings of Persia had plaited their sacred beards with golden thread, and the lords of Nineveh had curiously curled and oiled beards such as their winged bull wears. Bohadin tells us that Saladin's little son wept for terror when he saw the crusaders' envoys "with their clean-shaven chins." Selim I. (1512-21) comes down as a Turk ish sultan who broke into holy custom and cut off his beard, telling a remonstrating Mufti that his vizier should now have nothing to lead him by. But such tampering with tradition has its dangers, and the absolute rule of Peter the Great is made clear when we know that he taxed Russian beards and shaved his own, and yet died in his bed. Alexander the Great did as much and more with his well-drilled Macedonians, and was obeyed when he bade them shave off the handle by which an enemy could seize them.

With other traditions of their feudal age, the Japanese nation has broken with its ancient custom of the razor, and their emperor has beard and moustache ; a short moustache is common amongst Japanese officers and statesmen, and generals and admirals of Nippon follow the imperial example. The Nearer East also is abandoning the full beard, even in Mohammedan lands. Earlier shahs of the Kajar house have glorious beards below their girdles, but Nasiru'd-Din and his successor have shaved their chins. The tsar Alexander III.'s beard might have satisfied Ivan the Terrible, whose hands played delightedly with the five-foot beard of Queen Elizabeth's agent George Killingworth. Indeed the royal houses of Europe are for the most part bearded or whiskered. Leopold II., king of the Belgians, however, was in 19o9 the only sovereign with the full beard unclipped. The Austrian emperor, Francis Joseph, retained the moustache and whiskers of the '6os, and the German emperor, William II., for a short period commemorated by a few rare photographs, had a beard, although it was never suffered to reach the length of that beard which gave his father an air of Charlemagne or Barbarossa. In France bearded presidents have followed each other, but it may be noted that the waxed moustache and "imperial" beard of the Second Empire is now all but aban doned to the Frenchman of English comedy. The modern English fashion of shaving clean is rare in France save among actors, and during 1907 many Parisian waiters struck against the rule which forbade them to grow the moustache.

For the most part the clergy of the Roman obedience shave clean, as have done the popes for two centuries and more. But missionary bishops cultivate the long beard with some pride, and the orders have varying customs, the Dominican shaving and the Franciscan allowing the hair to grow. The Roman Catholic clergy of Dalmatia, secular and regular, are allowed to wear the mous tache without beard or whiskers, a concession to national preju dices.

English Fashions.

Amongst English people, always ready to be swayed by fashion, the hair of the face has been age by age, cherished or shaved away, curled or clipped into a hundred de vices. Before the immigration from Sleswick the Briton knew the use of the razor, sometimes shaving his chin, but leaving the moustache long. The old English also wore moustaches and forked beard, but, save for aged men, the beard had passed out of fash ion before the Norman Conquest. Matthew Paris had a strange idea that the beard was distinctive of Englishmen ; he asserts that those who remained in England were compelled to shave their beards, while the native nobles who went into exile kept their beards and flowing locks "like the Easterns and especially the Trojans." It was only about the year moo, according to Rodolf Glaber, that men began in the north of France to wear short hair and shave "like actors"; and even in the Bayeux tapestry the old Nor man shipwrights wear the beard. But so rare was hair on the face amongst the Norman invaders that William, the forefather of the Percys, was known in his lifetime and remembered after his death as William "Asgernuns" or "Oht les gernuns," i.e., "William with the moustaches," the epithet revived by one of his descendants making our modern name of Algernon. Fashion swung about after the Conquest, and, in the days of Henry I., Serle the bishop could compare bearded men of the Norman-English court with "filthy goats and bristly Saracens." The crusades, perhaps, were ac countable for the beards which were oddly denounced as effemi nate in the young courtiers of William Rufus. But for more than four centuries diversity is allowed, beards, moustaches and shaven faces being found side by side. Henry II. is a close-shaven king, and Richard II.'s effigy shows but a little tuft on each side of the chin, tufts which are two curled locks on the chin of Henry IV. But Henry III. is long-bearded, Edward II. curls his beard in three great ringlets, and the third Edward's long forked beard flows down his breast in patriarchal style. The mid-13th century is an age of many full and curled beards, although the region about the lips is sometimes clipped or shaved. The beard is com mon in the 14th century, the forked pattern being favoured and the long drooping moustache. Henry of Monmouth and his son are shaven, and thereafter beards are rare save with a few old folk until they come slowly back with the 16th century. Henry VIII., always a law to himself, brought back the beard to favour, Stowe's annals giving 1535 as the year in which he caused his beard "to be knotted and no more shaven," his hair being polled at the same time.

The age of Elizabeth saw lawyers, soldiers, courtiers and mer chants all bearded. A shaven chin such as that seen in the por trait of Philip Howard, earl of Arundel, is rare, but the beards take a hundred fashions, and satirists and Puritan pamphleteers were busy with them and with the men who wasted hours in perfuming or starching them, in dusting them with orris powder, in curling them with irons and quills. Stubbs gives them a place amongst his abuses. "It is a world to consider how their mowchatowes must be preserved or laid out from one cheek to another and turned up like two horns towards the forehead." The Elizabethan fashions continued under King James, the beard trimmed to a point being common wear; but under King Charles there is a certain reaction, and the royal style of shaving the cheeks and leaving the mous tache whose points sweep upward and the chin beard like a down ward flame is followed by most of the gentry.

From the Restoration year the razor comes more into use. Young men shave clean. The restored king curls a few dark hairs of a moustache over each cheek, but his brother James is shaven. With the reign of Queen Anne the country enters the beardless age, and beards, moustaches and whiskers are no more seen. In the 18th century the moustache indicated a soldier from beyond sea. A Jew or a Turk was known by the beard, an appendage loathsome as comic. That George III. in his madness should have been left unshaved was a circumstance of his misery that wrung the hearts of all loyal folk. But we may note that the hair of the face, which disappeared when wigs came in, began to reappear as wigs went out. Early in the 19th century the bucks began to show a patch of whisker beside the ear, and the soldier's moustache be came a common sight. Before Waterloo, guardsmen were com plaining that officers of humbler regiments imitated their fashion of the moustache, and by the Waterloo year most young cavalry officers were moustached. But for a civilian to grow a moustache was long reckoned a piece of unseemly swagger. Freedom in these matters only came when the troops were home from the Crimea, when officers who had grown beards and acquired the taste for tobacco during the long months in the trenches showed their beards and their cigars in Piccadilly. Then came the Volunteer movement, and every man was a soldier, taking a soldier's licence. The dominant fashion was the moustache, worn with long and drooping whiskers. But the "Piccadilly weepers" of the '6os were out of the mode for the younger men when the '8os began, and by the end of the century whiskers were seen in the army only upon a few veteran officers.

The footman, whose full-dress livery is the court dress of 1 oo years ago, must show no more than the rudimentary whisker of the early 1800s, and butler, coachman and groom come under the same rule. The jockey and the hunt whip are shaven likewise, but the courier has the whiskers and moustache that once marked him as a foreigner in the English milor's service, and the chauffeur, a servant with no tradition behind him, is often moustached.

Lastly, we may speak of the practice of the royal house since England came out of the beardless century. The regent took the new fashion, and sat "in whiskered state," but his brother and successor shaved clean and disliked even the hussar's moustache. The prince consort wore the moustache as a young man, adding whiskers in later years. King Edward VII. wore moustache and trimmed beard, and his heir has also followed the fashion of many fellow admirals. (O. B.)