The Press Saturday, January 8, 1927. Whiskers.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 18894, 8 January 1927, Page 14

The Press Saturday, January 8, 1927. Whiskers.

Signor Mussolini, according to a cable message yesterday morning, has been quite recklessly divulging to the United British Press Association the Secrets of empery. He must be careful, or he will end by explaining himself away; for there are innumerable people who believe that greatness, or " success," is the product of a formula. So long as they think it is a magic formula, they gasp in wordless admiration; but when the mystery, as they think, is out, and fades into the light of common day, they are swift to sigh in disillusion: " Oh, is that all!" And how generously, to such ready-reckoners, Mussoi lini has surrendered his mystery. Like ; Napoleon, he " retires at midnight and ! must not be awakened except for bad " news." Morning for him,- as for Pippa, is at seven- Like Alfred the Great, though Italy demands a more active and les3 studious regimen, he works, "plays, and sleeps to time-table. Like Nietzsche, he knows how to come to grips with life and get the best of it; but the mad old . German's philosophy rings louder as Mussolini's " clarion call": "It is necessary. to " live dangerously." Like every American millionaire, he breakfasts simply on a glass of milk. Like Julius Caesar, he shaves himself. Though it-is "the " essence of a charmed life" to live dangerously, and though Fascism is bound to a leader who is " the bravest " of the brave," there could be no sense in ignoring the fact that a barber's razor differs from an assassin's knife only by an instant's cruel flash and flicker;' and'perhaps that is why the Caesar of our day, like his forerunner, stretches his throat only to his own safe hand and steel. But to go cleanshaven is not Mussolini's whim or preference, but Mussolini's principle, and a doctrine of Fascism: I am an anti-whiskers man. "Whiskers are a sign' of decadence. When the decline ,of Roman glory began whiskers came into style. Fascism replaces them with clean-shaven youth, attired in riding-breeches.

It i 3 a pity; but Mussolini would have done better to stay in the commonplace company of Napoleon, Nietzsche, Alfred, and President Roosevelt. As their disciple in preaching a simple, orderly, and strenuous life, he would have missed originality; but he would also have escaped ridiculousness. Now he has stuck himself up in effigy on a barber's pole, where he will infuripte every man with a beard and make an excellent cock-shy. It'is true that in the unwinking ruthlessness which forces on the mind youth in riding-breeches ■as a substitute for whiskers there is something very nearly admirable, because it i 3 symbolic of the unwinking ruthles3ness which has . crammed on. Italy's head a new Imperial helmet; but as a creed and a trumpet-call anti-whisker-ism will not do. There ib no virtue in whiskers, and there is no virtue in dispensing with them. Decadence is neither proved by a flourishing growth of whiskers nor to be arrested by shaving them off; and whatever strength there is in Fascism is as far from being propped up on. sticks of shaving soap as it is from being nourished on cans of castor oil.

A new volume of photographs of [ Victorian celebrities reeently suggested to a. writer in The Times some [thoughts on "the standing puzzle I " about fashions in the wearing of " hair." His conclusion was that "only the more simple-minded find "any meaning in the way men wear " their hair. Whiskers do not always "mean wisdom,..nor beards benevo"lence. . . . In ancient - Egypt the "priesis went hairless; in Orthodox "Russia, they must be as hirsute as Nature may make them. And so, "through instance after instance, we v [" And nothing but contradiction and j " confusion." English''history, indeed, | is a bewildering succession of fads and fancies in the.matter of hair. Edward the -'Confessor .came : at the end of" : a bearded generation, and the Bayeux tapestry, which give 3 him a beard, gives Harold and his fellows none. Again, Chaucer, himself a .bearded poet, has a good deal-to say abput the beards of his pilgrims; bnt then men shaved until that bold innovator Henry VIII restored the beard to favour, and' in the lusty air of Elizabeth's reign -beards were as abundant and as unchecked as'genius. Ivan the Terrible's fingers played with the soft cascade of George , Killjnghain's beard, Killingham being Elizabeth's agent and his beard being five feet long. BuT such luxuriance as this diminished and was pruned into the pointed neatness of early Caroline days, and was totally razored away at the Restoration. Thp eightefenth century went wigged and, shaven,-the nineteenth began to'discard wigs and grow hair again, the army first, civilians timidly after, but with a sudden boldness when the Volunteer movement gave every man a soldier's privilege. Then was a growth unparalleled, perhaps, a florescence of which Tennyson's magnificent beard was the noblest example, Ruskin's the most beautiful, Darwin's the wildest, and TV. G. Grace's the most awful, while Matthew Arnold's sidewhiskers were the primmest, as the typical whiskers of the " Stunning "Cantab" in "Hiawatha's Photo"graphing" were the most ludicrous. •Extravagance, excess there certainly was, as anybody whose memory does not go far enough back can satisfy himself by looking through the files of Punch, or the more gruesome kind of family photograph album. ' He will find beards which might any of them have belonged to the gentleman in Edward Lear's poem, whose beard was a sort of aviary. Perhaps the reaction from these dreadful excesses culminated in the game of " Beaver," popular a little while ago. For the razor has certainly come into its own again, but not, as Mussolini would have it, as an instrument and stay of national glory. A man grows a beard if he is sure he will look better with a beard, or if he is Jazy: the rest shave, mostly without a reason. Mussolini, of - course, hM' the best of reasons for

shaving: a Chin. To mask that dominant feature would be as stupid as it would have been for the Iron Duke to muffle his nose or Sir Willoughby Patterne to curtain that peerless leg in Oxford trouserings.