BEARDS AGAIN?

Evening Post, Volume CIV, Issue 7, 8 July 1922, Page 12

BEARDS AGAIN?

THE SWING OF FASHION.

We are \yarned by one of the prophets of fashion that beards are to be worn once more. Upon what signs and tokena th-e prediction is founded does not appear. It is hardly to be contended, says the London Telegraph, that ihe" beard haa become a more common object; or that in social intercourse a new interest in beards is to be observed; but we would not disoredit the prophet.' What the impulse _is which inspires one century with a desire for beards is as much a mystery as that craving for the razor which marks another. No' one knows why beardsgrew again in Victorian England after two:. hundred years iof shaving. It is easy to say that King Edward VIL set the fashion,, but that only puts the difficulty in another manner. We . cannot; tell why the Prince of Wales of Queen' Victoria's reign should have chosen to wear what no King. had worn since Charles I. But.the changes of fashion havo been many,- even in Our own land. We will not inquire why Pericles wore a beard, but not Julius Caesar, or why no Pope before Julius 11. had suffered hair to grow on his chin. According to the Bayeux tapestry, Edward the Confessor had a beard, but not Harold. Tho Normans who came over with the Conqueror were clean-shaven, but it was a -new fashion in Normandy. Though a vehement prelate -called bearded men "filthy goats and bristly Saracens," there was for four hundred years no dominant fashions in England.' Moustaches, beards, and shaven faces were all to be found. Henry V. made shaving the rule until beards came in again with Henry. VIII. The Elizabethans were bearded, and very elaborately, for they cut their fteards .to all manner of shapes, perfumed them, dyed them, starched them, powdered them. Under the first Stuarts the beard became a chin. tuft. By. the beginning of the eighteenth century every mam wa_ clean shaved. At the end.of it moustaches and whiskers were coming' in again. At first these decorations were military. Everybody remembers how Clive New--corn., who ( was only a, painter, amused the Marquis of Farintosh by wearing moustaches. -.-In the middle of the century Dickens went abroad clean-shaven: a-hd grew himself a pair. ."They are beautiful, beautifnl," he wrote. "Without them life would be a blank." George IV. ventured upon whiskers, but William IV. shaved clean. In the year 1840 George Frederick Mun-tz, who, to. be sure, was a desperate Radical, brought a "huge Hack beard" into the House of Commons, where such a thing had not been seen for two centuries, and timid folk expected the immediate end of all things. The Prince Consort let hair grow on his face,' and whiskers became longer and longer; but even in 1857 people thought it desperately hold of Livingstone to "brave, the prejudices of his countrymen." by wearing a moustache, and within the last forty years' a bishop was blamed for wearing a beard! Who knows'what, the next turn of fashion maybe? Until the-war it seamed that: tho clean-shaven rface. was likely to become .the rule" once more. The war's crop of moustaches still flourishes, andanything may happen next—even _ new Dundreary. ' '' i ■■•■;■