WHISKERS AND WISDOM

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 30, 5 February 1927, Page 20

WHISKERS AND WISDOM

CHANGING EASHIONS OF WEAR-

ING HAIR.

The recent publication of Mrs. Cameron's photographs of famous men and fair women of the Victorian age brings anew to the mind the standing puzzle about fashions in the wearing of hair (says "The Times"). It must be accepted, since it cannot be explained, that whether women shave their heads and wear wigs, or leave their golden, or otherwise coloured, hair hanging down their backs, or coil it in ropes about their heads, or push it put behind them in "buns," or bob it a la golly - wog, or crop it like a schoolboy's, they are still found beautiful by men. But men do not by profession adapt- the fashion of their hair to an aesthetic end, and the effjets which they produce are capable of many interpretations. Hence come the confusion and the contradictions which bewilder the investigator. It has been more than -hinted .that 'the great Victorians owed some part of the greatness of .their aspect to their long hair^ They looked noble, leonine, Olympian. But in times when everyone wears much hair on head and face some other distinction is needed between great and little. To look at a college group photographed when photography was young is to sco many an undergraduate with long hair and bushy whiskers. They look old, indeed; but- not even loyalty to one's college can persuade one that they look great or intellectual. Many a seaside town has, or recently had, an elderly resident whom it pleased to go about iv a velvet jacket, with his hair long and a beard either full or pointed. He contributed verses to the local paper a::d believed himself a-poet. But even so much of his face as was left visible was enough to reveal to the discerning eye that he was a little poet, not a great. And today, when poets wear the whiskers that used to bo proper to grooms, when musicians go weekly to the barber and painters are cleaner shaven than priests, a man cannot show the greatne^ of his genius by the shortness of his hair. It may be suspected, then, that only the more simple-minded find any meaning in the way men tfear their hair. Whiskers do not always mean wisdom, nor beards beneficence. To cast one hurried glance towards those other forbidden mysteries; many a woman of to-day, whose hair looks shockingly "fast," is hor.self most virtuously alow. During the war a certain recruit was bidden by his sergeant, "Go and get your hair cvt —and then go and get your hair cut!" But fifty years ago our soldiers wore hair of a length at which that sergeant, or any other, would rage as unmanly; and in the days of . King Charles it was the long-haired men that were the gallant fellows, the lovers and the fighters, while the short-haired were hold for snivelling psalm-singers with no manhood in their chicken-livers. There are bald men who, but for a general consideration and courtesy, would go scudding before gales of laughtor under their bare polls; and there aro bald men whose • dignity is only enhanced by the revealed height of their brows. Walter Pater, the shy student and aesthete, wore a fierce cavalry moustache; and a cortain pugilist likes to have i.is hair as long as a girl's— bobbed-headed girl's. In ancient Egypt the priests went in Orthodox Eussia they must bz as hirsute as Nature may make them. And so, through instance after instance, we find nothing but contradiction and confusion; and we are forced to conclude that, no matter how a man wears his hair, his character will be none the more rovcaled or concealed by it. There must, however, always be exceptions to the rule. Some chins, at least, are the botter, fog-a Jgngij beaed. .. ■- -