Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (21 page)

Beyond the Swiss chalets was a majestic backdrop of farmyards, forests, and snow-capped Alps. On one side of the village square, fish swam in a pond; on the other, the village clock chimed eight o’clock. A crowd had gathered in anticipation. The man of the hour boldly stepped out from a chalet door. He was smartly dressed, hearty, thick, and bearded, but he was not Swiss. He wasn’t actually in Switzerland either. It was Albert Smith mounting a London stage elaborately decorated as a Swiss mountainside. He was opening another of his wildly popular performances of
The Ascent of Mont Blanc
.

Smith was perfectly attuned to what people of his era wished to see. The rising middle classes of Britain loved tales of danger, fortitude, and success, and so he decided in 1851 to climb Europe’s tallest mountain, in order to make a show of it. He wasn’t by any means the first to reach the summit, but he was in rare company. Only a few hundred men and one woman had been to the top, and none of them was capable of telling the story with Smith’s flair. Expertly blending humor and adventure, along with creative vocalization, Smith created a lively cast of amusing
characters, vibrant scenes, and a dash of satire. Even a half century later, the novelist Henry James retained vivid memories of seeing
Mont Blanc
as a child: “Big, bearded, rattling, chattering, mimicking Albert Smith again charms my sense . . .”
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The first half of
Mont Blanc
was Smith’s description of his travels from London to the Swiss village of Chamonix, replete with all the sights, sounds, and personalities that Smith adroitly conjured. One of his most remarkable effects, as James remembered, was “the very brief stop and re-departure of the train at Epernay, with the ringing of bells, the bawling of guards, the cries of travelers, the slamming of doors and the tremendous pop as of a colossal champagne-cork, made all simultaneous and vivid by Mr. Smith’s mere personal resources and graces.” Of the many amusing characters along the way, one appreciative journalist fondly asked, “Who that heard them will ever forget undecided Mr. Parker, the man who could not ever make up his mind; or Mrs. Seymour in constant search for that black box from which she had been ruthlessly parted; or the two old ladies who, travelling in their own carriage, enjoyed Switzerland so much because they always pulled down the blinds when they came near any precipices? And, best of all, the thoroughly Dickensian character, Edwards the engineer in the service of the Austrian Lloyds, who was always impressing upon his hearer his grand discovery, ‘What I says is, India isn’t England, Mr. Smith!’’’
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In the second act of
Mont Blanc
, Smith dramatized the daunting trek to the top of Europe’s tallest mountain, followed by a triumphant, raucous descent. It was a tale of excitement, daring, and danger. The most fearsome obstacle to Smith and his Swiss guides was the formidable “Mur de la Cote,” a nearly perpendicular wall of ice a hundred feet high near the pinnacle of the mountain. Smith told his breathless audience that every foothold had to be cut by an axe, that the slightest slip of a foot threatened to plunge them all into “an icy abyss so deep that the bottom is lost in obscurity.”
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By the time the climbers reached this critical point, however, they had also reached the limits of their physical strength, their “muscular powers already taxed far beyond their strength, and nerves shaken by constantly increasing excitement and want of rest.”
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A harsh, cold wind whipped around them. Thin air and lack of sleep robbed Smith of both his strength and his senses. He
felt an overwhelming drowsiness, and, he assured his rapt listeners, if he had stopped even for a moment, he would have fallen asleep, dooming both himself and the three guides roped to him.

Pushed to the limit, Smith nevertheless managed to reach the top, where, by his own account, he immediately lost consciousness, spending his first seven minutes on the summit in a deep slumber. Carried away by the emotions of adventure, Smith’s audience shared the storyteller’s catharsis of bemusement and relief at this humorous and exhilarating climax. The descent was a festival of shouting, sliding, and tumbling along the snowfields leading straight to the show’s grand finale, a fast-paced patter song called “Galignani’s Messenger,” in which Smith satirized current events by pretending to catch up on the news he had missed on his great adventure. In this way, Smith brought his audience full circle from humor to adventure and back to fun; and also from London to the mountaintop and back again.

Mont Blanc
made Smith a superstar. As one magazine reported in 1860, with only slight exaggeration, “No one is more widely known in this country than Mr. Albert Smith, or enjoys a more extensive popularity. . . . Everybody has seen Albert Smith, and everybody else has seen his portrait.”
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Over seven years, between 1852 and 1858, Smith performed
Mont Blanc
more than two thouand times to a total audience of more than half a million people.
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Prince Albert attended in 1853. Queen Victoria and the royal children attended three times, the final two at command performances, at Osborne in 1855 and Windsor Castle in 1856. More than any other man, Smith was responsible for the mountaineering craze that seized Britain in subsequent decades, and for the foundation of the Alpine Club in 1857.

Smith was successful because he was funny, dramatic, and entertaining but also because he appealed to the deepest aspirations of his era. To stand astride the frozen heights of Europe was the Victorian equivalent of slaying the dragon. Indeed, it was a feat beyond the capacity of a medieval knight. In this way, his story bespoke both heroism and progress. The eager crowds who flocked to Smith’s shows discovered to their great delight that the age of machines, factories, and cities had not banished heroic manliness. On the contrary, there were new frontiers to cross and new quests to undertake. In Smith they saw the prototype of this modern manliness: independent, hearty, bold, and bearded.

The modern manliness that Smith embodied was in some respects old-fashioned. He faced the raw elements of nature, not the challenges of science or industry. On the other hand, his manliness was also modern and democratic. He demonstrated the power of personal character, and his triumph arose not from privilege and good fortune but from strength of body and will. It was precisely these qualities that men of the era honored most, and readily associated with the full, natural beard.

While London audiences thrilled to mountain climbing, American readers discovered a vigorous new voice for physical manliness on their own side of the Atlantic. Appearing in 1855, Walt Whitman’s poetry collection
Leaves of Grass
urged Americans to find the spiritual in the material and the material in the spiritual, starting with their own bodies. “I am the poet of the body,” Whitman wrote, “And I am the poet of the soul.”
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Two pages later he declares, “I am the poet of commonsense, and of the demonstrable, and of immortality, And am not the poet of goodness only . . . I do not decline to be the poet of wickedness also. Washes and razors for foofoos . . . for me freckles and a bristling beard.” Whitman may have been interested in the good and bad, the body and soul, but he was not interested in shaving, which for him represented fear and escape from the rigors of life. His beard, and beards in general, bespoke a real and vital manliness that did not shrink from the terrors and joys of life, but grasped all it had to offer.

In Whitman’s view, the meaning of life was rooted in the source of life itself, the body. He did not think the flesh was to be despised. On the contrary,

He offered a poetic inventory of his own body, declaring each holy, including “mixed tussled hay of head and beard and brawn . . .”

Whitman thrilled his readers with a sense of freedom and discovery, as well as hope that there was more to life than routine and self-denial. The public response to these stanzas was ecstatic. One critic enthused that here was “an American bard at last! . . . One of the roughs, large, proud, affectionate, eating, drinking, and breeding, his costume manly and free, his face sunburnt and bearded, his postures strong and erect, his voice bringing hope and prophecy to the generous races of young and old.”
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A full-length photographic portrait of a rough, “sunburnt and bearded” Whitman graced every copy of
Leaves of Grass
, providing a crucial visual complement to his poetic self-portrait, helping make his face as recognizable in America as Smith’s was in Britain. They were the
bearded prophets of a modern manliness founded on physical vigor, fearless adventure, and personal resilience.

Whitman and his admirers believed he was describing an ideal American type, but as Louis Napoleon and Albert Smith proved, the admiration of bearded hardiness was by no means uniquely American. During the years between 1852, when Smith launched his show, and 1855, when Whitman published his song to himself, a wave of pro-beard manifestoes washed over Europe and the Americas. The British and American presses in particular grew hot churning out editorials and articles in favor of hair. The editors of the respectable
Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine
led the charge in Britain, declaring themselves in 1852 “champions of the long beard.”
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In the following year, Henry Morley and William Henry Wills published a beard manifesto in Charles Dickens’s widely read magazine
Household Words,
entitled “Why Shave?”
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There were entire volumes as well, including
The Philosophy of Beards
, by the Englishman Thomas S. Gowing. Journals such as the prestigious
Westminster Review
,
Illustrated London News
, and
New York Times
commented extensively on these and other publications and pronounced the arrival of a “beard and moustache movement.” The British humor magazine
Punch
happily joined the fray with a series of satirical cartoons.
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One of these cartoons, drawn by John Leech, the magazine’s chief cartoonist, poked fun at the shock produced by the sudden effusion of hair. A woman in a railway station believes herself beset by thieves when polite but hairy porters approach to assist her. Leech places in the background a visual clue to what he thinks is behind this surprising transformation: a placard with the words “Mont Blanc”—an advertisement for Albert Smith’s show (
figure 9.4
).

American journals reproduced many of these British articles and added more of their own. A similar passion spread throughout Europe, though the French, as we have seen, had stolen a march on the rest. The 1850s emerged as a remarkable moment in masculine history. Never before had Western society become so invested in the question of beards, and never before had the faces of men changed so rapidly or so completely. As New York City’s
Home Journal
observed with evident surprise in 1854, “Go where you will, the full, flourishing, ferocious beard presents itself!—in Broadway, or in the Bowery; in Fifth avenue, or along the quays; in the drawing room, or in the bar room; down in
the oyster cellar, or up on the mast head. Nature has triumphed! and comfort and fashion at last coincide!”
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The flourishing commentary on hair in these years attempted to put into words the popular philosophy of beards and manliness. In this venture, apologists for hair were remarkably united and consistent, agreeing that God, providence, or nature had provided the beard to ensure manly dignity and authority in three primary ways: promoting physical health, representing manly virtues, and demonstrating the superiority of men over women.

The idea that beards are healthy fit easily with the general emphasis on physical manliness, and addressed concerns about industrialization, the growth of cities, and the many contemporary threats to public health. In reality, the health arguments of the 1850s were not much different from those proclaimed during the Renaissance beard movement three hundred years earlier. In 1851, for example, a French intellectual, Boucher de Perthes, voiced a common medical opinion that men without beards often had toothaches, whereas facial hair prevented “congestion and ailments of the throat.”
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The editors of the British medical
journal
Lancet
, echoed by the American
Medical and Surgical Reporter
, pronounced in 1860, “We hope science and common sense will come to the rescue, and not only let soldiers and policemen continue to wear upon their faces the natural covering they have been given, but induce wheezing, sneezing, sore-throated, shivering mortals, who have trembled more at the keen edge of a January air or March wind than of a razor, to cease wasting their time.”
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A uniquely nineteenth-century idea was that beards and mustaches helped filter bad air. This idea was endorsed by many authorities, including the prestigious
Edinburgh Review
, which drew attention in an article on worker health to fumes and dust as a cause of disease, and recommended beards and mustaches as one defense.
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