THE APPEAL OF WHISKERS.

Star (Christchurch), Issue 18958, 2 January 1930, Page 13

THE APPEAL OF WHISKERS.

Beards Adorn All The Greatest Lovers.

(Written for the “ Star ” by

W. E. KEYS.)

Statisticians, filling in the hours before they grapple with the census of 1930, have discovered that the habit of shaving is now more universal than at any other time since the Napoleonic wars, but they do not tell us why. The ancient argument against whiskers no longer holds—that they made a convenient handle by which an enemy could grip you while he stabbed you under the fifth rib. But in our time neither in love nor war is a smooth face of any advantage. In war, shaving, even with the safety razor, is one of the plagues of discipline. In love, the smooth-shaven face is a handicap. Nature undoubtedly intended that a man should glory in his beard; that he should nourish it and groom it as a distinguishing attribute of sex appeal. How interesting it would be if we could only know whether during the periods when whiskerage has been popular men were more successful in courtship than in the long stretches of beardless time! There is much to support an argument in the affirmative. Polygamy and whiskers have always flourished side by side. We have the outstanding examples of King Solomon and Henry VIII., who were full-bearded, and who were irresistible lovers. Great Revival under Victoria. Everybody knows how the Queen of Sheba succumbed to the spell of King Solomon in the very face of his 300 lawful consorts. Coming from Ethiopia, where men could raise only wisps of beard, she was probably smitten at her very first sight of the silken cascades of hair flowing over the great King’s bosom. As for King Ilenry, though he was mighty handsome as a youth, Holbein’s portraits of him in the days of his swift wooings disclose nothing of the matinee idol—indicate nothing of the secret of his charm with women, unless it was his reddish, fan-shaped beard. Redoubtable wooers seem to have been scarce during the long, beardless generations that separated Queen Anne from Queen Victoria. The remarkable Victorian revival of beards, therefore, naturally prompts the query whether it was accompanied by any significant evidence of their sex appeal. We only know that everybody who was anybody, on both sides of the sea, followed the fashion —men of letters and of science, statesmen, artists, musicians. Hard Fate of the Beardless. Though we may look in vain in the sober chronicles of the time for any notes on the influence of this extraordinary prevalence of facial herbage in affairs of the heart, mid-Victorian fiction is filled with allusions to it. An ambrosial, Jovian beard was the surest thing to set a maidenly heart to palpitating—the almost inevitable precursor of conquest. Anthony Trollope, who let no razor touch his face, had a particular fondness for the whiskers of hu favourite characters. In “ Barchester Towers ” hardly a man is without them. There is the prebendary, whose whiskers were very large and white, “ and gave to his face the appearance of a benevolent, sleepy old lion.” His son Bertie’s beard “ had been prepared in the Holy Land, and was patriarchal.” IT*;-, never shaved, and rarely trimmed it. It was glossy and soft, “ such that ladies might desire to reel it off and work it into their patterns in lieu of floss silk.” The hero of “ The Three Clerks ” had " a pair of black curly whiskers which almost surrounded his

face, and had been the delight and wonder of ths.- maidservants in his mother’s house.” It might be hard to prove that Trol- , lope’s heroes are always so bedecked, and equally hard to prove that all his odious characters are beardless, but it is significant that one of the vilest and most unpleasant of the latter, the Rev Air Slope, wore no whiskers and was always punctiliously shaven. Was it just for that that one lady of whom he was enamoured laughed his love to scorn and another boxed his ears? If, then, a beard is a way to a woman’s favour, how should it be worn? On that point Trollope and his contemporary novelists fail to throw any light. But there is evidence to show that Dundreary weepers and the full, Solomonic beard were closely tied for favour. Both had to be tended and groomed with infinite care, like the main and tail of a prize stallion. Side whiskers were especially difficult. Their proud possessor could not lay his cheek upon his hand without undoing his whole facial structure. If, however, he let the hair grow all over his face, he could, as a writer of the time informs us, indulge freely “in the joy of playing meditatively with a rich, untrammelled beard ” —a joy which the demure maidens of that decorous era perhaps permitted themselves to share. The conclusion of the whole matter is that the women of this beardless age do not know what they are missing. They may turn up their noses at beards xiow, but they will surely dote upon them madly when the whirligig of fashion brings them in again, the inevitable hour which awaits only the coming of a new hero of the air or the camp or a new screen actor blessed with a beard streaming in the wind like that of a Norse god in Valhalla. (Anglo-American N.S. Copyright.)