Beards and no beards / by J. Cuthbert Hadden ; illustrated by Joseph Grego.

  • Hadden, J. Cuthbert (James Cuthbert), 1861-1914
Date:
1892?]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Beards and no beards / by J. Cuthbert Hadden ; illustrated by Joseph Grego. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    BEARDS AND NO BEARDS By J. CUTHBERT HADDEN. Illustrated by JOSEPH GREGO. ^HAVING, De Quincey used to say, was a grand difficulty. He allowed his beard to grow, not as some men do, because it kept him out of many a painful “ scrape,” but simply because he could not be troubled shaving himself. Southey belonged also to the class who, with Leigh Hunt, look upon shaving as a “villainous and unnecessary cus¬ tom.” And yet he tells us that if he could boast of a beard, he “ would cherish it as the Cid Campeador did his, for my pleas¬ ure.” He would regale it on a summer’s day with rose-water, and without making it an idol, he would sometimes offer incense to it with a pastile or with lavender and sugar. His children, when they were young enough for such blandishments, would delight to comb and stroke and curl it, and his grandchildren in turn would succeed to the same course of mutual endearment. But Southey probably em¬ ployed the razor as Cervantes advised in the case of Sancho—in order to secure a comely appearance. Or perhaps, like Martin Luther, he believed in the intimate connection between shaving and sin— believed that the beard is ingrained in man like evil itself: that neither can be eradicated, but that both must be resisted and unceasingly cut down. Such a notion is not likely to have ever entered into the head of the historian of England, who as a rule mortified the flesh by shaving himself. When Macaulay went to a barber, and after an easy shave asked what he had to pay, the shaver replied, “Just what you generally give the man who shaves you, sir.” “ I generally give him,” said the historian, “a couple of cuts on each cheek.” Some men are not so niggardly to themselves, and these are probably the cynics who look upon the beard as the penalty incurred by the eating of the forbidden fruit. And this is a theory that is at least plausible, for the daily labour of rooting out the martial growth that fringes the cheek of the genus homo, is a labour in which the sweat of the brow is not altogether unfamiliar, while even the tears have been known to flow as from a heart “bowed down be¬ neath a load of sin.” It is certainly disquieting to think that Eve may be at the bottom of that twenty-seven feet of hirsute stubble which the German scientist calculates that a man has mowed down by the time he is eighty ! But there is the other theory, favoured by the disciples of Darwin, that the beard is merely the survival of a primitive decoration. Man, according to this view, was originally as hairy as the opossum itself, but as he rolled down the ages, he wore the hair off in patches by sleeping on his sides and sitting against a tree. Of course the hair of the dog is not worn, off in this way, but a great theory is not to be set aside by an objection so trifling. By and by our ancestors “awoke to the consciousness that they were patchy and spotty,” and resolving to “ live down ” all hair that was not ornamental, they, with remarkable unanimity, seem to have fixed on the eye- D 2