WHISKERS AND WISDOM

Greymouth Evening Star, 26 February 1927, Page 11

WHISKERS AND WISDOM

A STANDING PUZZLE.

The recent publications 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 beexplained, that whether women shave their heads and wear wigs, or leave their golden, or otherwise colored hair hanging down their backs, or coil it in ropes about their heads, or push it out behind them in “buns” or bob it a la gollywog, 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 effects which they produce are capable of many interpretations. Hence . come the confusion and the contradictions which bewilder the investigator. It has been 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 wh6n 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 see 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 in a velvet jacket, with his hair long and a beard either full or pointed. He contributed verses to the local paper and 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 wiskers that used to be proper to grooms; when musicians go weekly to the barber and painters are cleaner shaven than priests, a man cannot show the greatness of his genius by the shortness of his hair. It may be suspected, then, that only the more simple-mind-ed find any meaning in the -way men wear their hair. Whiskers do not always mean wisdom, nor beards beneficence. To cast one hurried glance towards those othei’ forbidden mysteries; many a woman of to-day, whose hail- looks shockingly “fast,” is herself most virtuously slow. During the war a certain recruit was bidden by his sergeant, “Go and get your hair cut, 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 o! King Charles it was the longhaired men that were the gallant fellows, the lovers, and the fighters, while the short-haired were held 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 laughter under their bare polls; and there are bald men tvhose dignity is only enhanced by the revealed height of their brows. Walter Pater, the shy student and aesthetic, wore a fierce cavalry moustache; and a certain pugilist likes to have his hair as long as a girl’s—a bobbed-headed girl’s. In ancient Egypt the priests went hairless; in Orthodox Russia they must be 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 revealed or concealed by it. There must, however, always be exceptions to the rule. Some chins, at least, are the better for a kindly beard