WHY DO WE SHAVE?

Evening Star, Issue 20985, 26 December 1931, Page 3

WHY DO WE SHAVE?

LEGENDS OF THE BEARD Why does man shave? The question is propounded in a little treatise on the human beard which_ has just come out of Cambridge, a university always devoted to the fundamental problems of human life. A lady biologist, it appears, who was lecturing to Cambridge, was facetious about the time men waste in shaving, and threatened that by natural selection a race of beardless men could bo evolved. Cambridge has been roused to discuss the advantages of such reform. But 1 cannot think the lady speaks for her sox (says a writer in an English paper). In any object for our improvement by evolution the co-operation of women must be secured. “ Lord, I could not endure a husband with a beard on his face,” says Beatrice in the play, but very logically and naturally goes on to declare the strongest objections to him that has none. Where is any sign of the preference of the fair for a face that needs no shaving? An old tradition declares that Adam was created without a beard, but after the fall lie was condemned to grow hair upon his face that he should be more like the beasts and bear the mark of their equal and companion. Why, then, should Eve have been allowed to keep her chin smooth? The answer of tradition is that even in the fall Eve was adjudged to “ retain much of her original modesty,” so she was spared the punishment of a beard. Another flagrant injustice to man. The legends of the beard are strongly in favour of shaving. Good angels, it is insisted, never wear beardsl, but the fallen angels soon grow them, and the whole regiment of fiends is bearded. The devil himself, however, I have heard, has in his beard but one lonely and very long hair. And yet the theologians and the moralists are very confused about boards. This Cambridge treatise recalls that Tertullian cohdemned_ shaving as “ an impious attempt to improve the works of the Creator.” But Luther held that the beard was like sin, ingrained in man, and against both we must zealously and continuously struggle. When shaving began and where and why are all mysteries. Certainly men in Egypt and Mesopotamia wore bare chins 5,000 years ago. But it is equally certain that very long ago a beard was necessary to dignity. The Assyrian conquerors were magnificently boarded. It was a horrid insult to cut off a man’s beard in ancient Palestine, and, indeed, the Jew had been commanded “ neither shalt thou mar the corners of they beard.” Even in a world of cleanshaven faces we still feel something of this reverence for hair upon the chin. The patriarchs, the ancient kings, real or fabulous, must have their beards, Abraham and Agamemnon, Arthur and Charlemagne. And yet it seems to have been one of the greatest of kings, Alexander, who taught Europe to shave. He issued orders that Ins soldiers must not wear beards, for the reason that a beard was a good handle by which to take hold of a man in battle. Whether the ban on beards in our army is maintained on the same ground I cannot tell. But from Alexander’s, time the Greek .and the Roman were shaved, except for certain intellectuals, until the Emperor Hadrian thought he looked well in a beard, and for the eighteen centuries since his day beards have been going in and out like other fashions.

Taking one period with another, there is as good reason to believe that women prefer a beard as that they do not. The Normans came to England shaven—their back hair as well as their chins. Their sons let hair grow in both regions, and before long a bishop was thundering that they had put on beards “ for fear that if they shaved the short bristles might prickle the faces of their ladies.” Consider the sad ease of Louis VII. To please the clergy he cropped his hair and shaved off his beard. When sho saw his face naked his wife found it so ridiculous that she ran away from him and married our Henry 11.