Of Beards and Men: The Revealing History of Facial Hair (23 page)

Luke Fildes was a rare example of a financially successful visual artist. Rising from humble working-class origins, he was by the 1870s making a good living painting portraits of British elites, including several
members of the royal family. He was not entirely satisfied with his success, however. He yearned to make a statement. He got his opportunity when the wealthy art impresario Henry Tate commissioned from him a work of social significance to help launch his new gallery of English art. After years of thought, Fildes decided to “put on record the status of the doctor in our time.”
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In 1891, he completed
The Doctor
, one of the most widely admired and reproduced paintings of the past two centuries. In his subject matter, and the manner in which he addressed it, Fildes struck a chord. He had presented a deeply satisfying portrayal of the ideal professional man, and by the same token, a powerful version of the manly ideal (
figure 9.6
).

The subject of the painting was clear from the title and from the composition of the work. It was not about the sick child, the poverty of his surroundings, or his helpless parents in the background. It is about the doctor, who dominates the canvas, and the knowledgeable care he devotes to the innocent victims of disease. Fildes himself had lost a son to illness over a decade before, and the image reproduces this tragedy
with all its anguish and pathos. Fildes projects his own emotions into the figure of the helpless but watchful father, and offers hope for a good outcome, indicated by the bright light illuminating the resting child, as well as the assuring competence of the doctor himself. With his knowledge of medicine, reflected in the bottles on the table, and his gentlemanly education and good reputation, suggested by his elegant clothes and top hat, the doctor leads one to feel the boy is in good hands. What is more, this gentlemanly physician has kindly sacrificed his own pleasures—perhaps a dinner party—to attend a needy family. The magic of this image is the seamless blending of caring and competence in the doctor’s character.
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Fildes was saying that neither training nor compassion is enough to make a good doctor; one must have both. The mother cares deeply but does not have the knowledge, and so she collapses in despair. The father has more fortitude but he too lacks expertise and looks anxiously to the doctor for help. Only the doctor can act effectively.

The action, such as it is, unfolds on the doctor’s face as he leans toward his young patient. The slightly furrowed brow and focused gaze indicate concern. His pose is thoughtful, his peppery, full beard suggesting knowledge and experience. The anxious young father in the background, lacking this mark of manly wisdom, watches anxiously. The beard is the key to the doctor’s character, granting him strength of mind and purpose he would lack without it. Fildes knew this intuitively. The primary model he used when painting the doctor was a clean-shaven actor, but the painter did not use his model’s face. In fact, the doctor looks very much like Fildes himself.
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For this masterwork of a lifetime, Fildes thought long and hard about his subject and how to portray it. He chose to represent the skilled professional as the ideal of modern manliness. The doctor was neither an aristocrat, a soldier, nor a captain of industry, yet he deserved high honor. He cared like a mother, but he was not feminine. His beard made sure of that, and it underscored the painting’s message that it takes a man to get things done when it counts the most, even in the care of children.

Luke Fildes was not alone in his imagination of hairy manliness. Physicians, artists, writers, and clergymen were particularly enthusiastic champions of the beard even after facial hair had fallen into general
disfavor at the end of the century. What bearded writers and artists like Smith, Whitman, and Fildes hoped to prove was that work of the mind demanded the same masculine strength and vigor as any physical labor.

In several important respects, the nineteenth-century beard movement paralleled that of the sixteenth century. In both cases one finds renewed attention to the human body as the root of authentic manhood, and an inevitable fascination with its apparent contradiction in the existence of bearded women. Men of both eras esteemed facial hair as natural proof of male vitality, autonomy, and authority over women. In the nineteenth century, if not in the earlier period, this appeal to physical nature was animated by the increasing fluidity of social life, particularly in the urban middle ranks of society. Changing environments of work and family unsettled the patterns of home life, created new forms of female authority, and complicated the role of the man as master of his family. In this context, a beard was conservative and comforting, a signal that some things, at least, never change. Beards also bespoke masculine heroism: Louis Napoleon was not as accomplished as his uncle, but he
looked
impressive with his three-pointed imperial. Albert Smith and Walt Whitman cast themselves as brave adventurers. Luke Fildes painted a heroic healer in his own image. Even a small girl could see that Abraham Lincoln would seem a better leader with a more impressive face.

Late nineteenth-century champions of beardedness did not emphasize the aging effect of facial hair. Instead they spoke of energy and independence. Men were encouraged to become, like Whitman, the hero of their own story: “Washes and razors for foofoos . . . for me freckles and a bristling beard.”

Beards helped men of the nineteenth century recover their primal manliness. Facial hair affirmed the “natural” fortitude that entitled a man to rule over his family and build empires. But hair alone was not enough to define the modern man. As the twentieth century approached, European and American men also embraced athletic competition and bodybuilding, activities that, like beards, were physical proofs of virility. It stood to reason that a bearded athlete would emerge at this time as an icon of the ideal man. It also stood to reason that this sportsman would be an Englishman, because the first industrial nation also took first place in its mania for games.

The greatest cricket player of the Victorian age, William Gilbert Grace dominated Britain’s most prestigious sport at a time when spectator sports were weaving themselves into the fabric of European life. For three decades, from the 1870s to the 1890s, cricket enthusiasts packed the stands for any game in which he played. He was famous as an all-around player, but especially for his achievements with the bat. The first generation of sports fans loved Grace’s ability to fight off any sort and speed of bowls, and rack up astonishing run totals. He was revered
also as a gentleman player, an amateur who played for glory rather than pay. For many of his active years he was a practicing physician, but the truth was he spent most of his time—and earned most of his money—playing cricket. He looked the part, too. Tall, thickly built, and heavily bearded, he was the quintessence of British sporting manhood.

One of the most fondly repeated stories about Grace involves a challenge to his legendary beard. It happened in a match between the English and Australian national teams, which was then, as now, the most emotionally charged rivalry in cricket. The tanned Australians were always eager to show the mother country what they were made of, and the pale Englishmen were equally keen to demonstrate that they retained the vigor of imperial greatness. When the Australians visited England for a series of test matches in 1896, Grace was forty-eight years old but still active and still captain of the English side. In one match, played in the hallowed turf of Lord’s Cricket Grounds in London, the grandmaster of the cricket bat confronted a fresh-faced and dynamic Australian bowler named Ernest Jones. It would be hard to imagine two more appropriate representatives of the old country and the young colony. Excited to face the game’s greatest player, Jones opened with a ballistic bowl that flew up from the turf and split the beard of the great man right below his chin. The crowd buzzed, and Grace barked back to the bowler, “Whatever are ye at?” “Sorry, Doctor, she slipped,” the young colonial replied.
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Accident or not, the English captain quickly regained his composure, redoubled his resolve, and sent crashing hits in all directions, propelling England to resounding victory. The colonials had mounted their challenge, but the English master was more than equal to the task. That, at least, was the story told by the home crowd.

Grace and his majestic beard were icons of England, and of the emerging passion for competitive sports that grew in tandem with industrialization and urbanization. London’s Marylebone Cricket Club, which defined the modern game, held its first matches in 1787, just a few years after James Watt perfected the rotary steam engine and a few years before the outbreak of the French Revolution. The popularity of cricket and other sports mirrored the advance of urbanization thereafter. The first Oxford-Cambridge cricket match was held before a few hundred spectators in 1827, just as the industrial revolution was
hitting full stride. By contrast, a crowd of forty-six thousand gathered to watch the two universities square off in 1883.
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Likewise, the annual match between the prestigious preparatory schools Eton and Harrow attracted only a few spectators in 1850, but drew a crowd of nearly ten thousand by 1864. There was a similar pattern in rowing, football, and
rugby. One observer declared in 1870 that young men were “possessed by a perfect mania for every species of athletic contest.”
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Athletic enthusiasm even took on theological dimensions. Influential English authors and clergymen embraced sporting competition as an expression of modern Christian manliness. Though critics mocked this attitude as “muscular Christianity,” the label and its principles took a firm hold on the British mind. The single most influential expression of muscular Christianity was Thomas Hughes’s blockbuster 1857 novel,
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
. Set in Hughes’s old school of Rugby in the 1830s,
Tom Brown
described games and sports as a key element of both school and moral life. A rugby match early in the novel is an opportunity for boys like Tom to demonstrate their pluck and courage. A final cricket match at the end of the novel, when Tom and his friends are eighteen and about to graduate, exhibits the maturity of Rugby’s refined gentlemen. The young men play with skill and honor, and even the least athletic boys demonstrate an admirable nerve and perseverance that is a credit to their school and their sex. Playing, not winning, is the point, and this fictional cricket match concludes with an honorable defeat for Rugby as darkness descends.

W. G. Grace was nine years old when
Tom Brown
first appeared in print, and the novel’s popularity helps to explain Grace’s rise to fame. Hughes’s story of sturdy manliness captured the English imagination and colored the popular view of sports and athletes. The story of the bowl that split Grace’s beard echoes this theme precisely. Grace proved his fortitude and power in the face of challenge and danger, just as the fictional Tom Brown does by absorbing fierce rugby tackles or punishing fistfights. That Grace’s beard was under assault was doubly appropriate, for it symbolically represented both moral character and physical strength. Grace’s ability to defend the honor of his beard and his country was the triumph of natural manliness in the modern world.

In Grace’s day, the British were proud of themselves for stealing a march on other nations in the field of physical culture. In 1859, Thomas C. Grattan, a British consul to the United States, dismissed Americans as less manly than the British because they did not play vigorous field sports, spending their leisure time instead chewing tobacco, smoking, and drinking. “They have no breadth either of shoulders, information or ambition,” the consul declared. “Their physical powers are subdued and their mental capability cribbed into narrow limits.”
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Forward-thinking Americans were duly alarmed about their own backwardness, and they urgently sounded the alarm. One of these was the Unitarian minister and reformer Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who in 1858 wrote an article decrying the common assumption that physical vigor was at odds with spiritual and moral virtues, and urging men of learning to take up the cause of physical culture. “Physical health,” he argued, was “a necessary condition of permanent success” because bodily vigor was the foundation of moral courage. “Guarantee us against physical degeneration,” he insisted, “and we can risk all other perils,—financial crises, Slavery, Romanism, Mormonism, Border Ruffians and New York assassins.”
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In spite of these pleas, the British could still claim the lead in the 1860s, in part because of physical education advocates like William Penny Brookes, a physician who organized the first Olympic competitions in his hometown of Wenlock. In 1866, he organized a national Olympics in London that might have become an annual tradition had the powerful and jealous London athletic clubs allowed it. The winner of the hurdles race in this one-off national competition was a beardless eighteen-year-old named W. G. Grace. Brookes was passionate about his Olympics idea because he worried for modern manhood. In a speech at the close of the 1866 competition, he declared his fear that manliness in industrial nations was in decline and in desperate need of athletic invigoration. He thought the Americans and French were worse off than the British.
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He noted that the French press had reported that military recruiters were forced to turn away a huge proportion of men as unfit for service, which at least one French newspaper attributed to overwork in factories and lack of physical education. It was a warning, Brookes concluded, that nations would survive only if their men remained active and fit.
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France’s leading champion of physical education, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, was troubled by the same fears and inspired by the same ideals. Coubertin read
Tom Brown’s Schooldays
, as well as Brookes’s lectures and articles.
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He traveled to Britain many times in the 1880s and 1890s, visiting Rugby and observing the Wenlock Olympic games for himself. The idea of a global Olympics competition to foster the peaceful regeneration of mankind percolated in his mind until the 1890s, when he secured enough support to put it into effect. Coubertin’s vision
was more about rebuilding manliness than it was about athletic competition as such, and that is why only amateurs were allowed to compete. Amateurs were the ideal sportsmen because, like W. G. Grace or Tom Brown, their athleticism manifested good character rather than mercenary training or calculation. Honor was more important than victory, and it was a matter of how one played the game rather than the results. Grace was a gentleman amateur, a physician, husband, and father first, and then a cricket player—or so the theory went. The problem with this notion of amateurism, and with the related notions of muscular Christianity, was that competition is ultimately defined by victory and defeat, and it is hard to reconcile sportsmanship with an indifference to winning. Already by 1896, when Grace’s beard was clipped by Jones’s high bowl, and when the first International Olympiad was held at Athens, professionalism was taking hold in cricket and other spectator sports in Europe and America. Grace successfully bridged the gentlemanly and professional eras by being both an amateur and a winner.

In retrospect, the reign of amateurism in spectator sports was relatively brief, as was the era of bearded athletes. W. G. Grace represented the happy conjunction of the beard movement and the gentlemanly athleticism in the Victorian era. As the century came to an end, a new formulation of manliness took precedence. Increasingly, the athlete became a man of muscle and speed rather than hair. To the extent that hair detracted from a youthful and muscular look, it had to be sacrificed. Even in the 1870s, when both Grace and the Victorian beard movement were in their prime, most young men of cricket, rowing, running, football, and gymnastics favored mustaches or even a clean shave in order to emphasize youth and vigor. The military mustache was a better fit than a beard for those who embraced teamwork, dash, and daring. The beard might denote maturity, wisdom, and stolidity, but those were not the ideals of fast-paced turn-of-the-century Europe.

The new passion for youth, speed, and strength was universal, whether in English football, French cycling, or German gymnastics. The French acquired an abiding zeal for bicycle racing at the end of the century, and this sport provides an excellent example of the conflict between hair and speed. The first French races were held in the 1860s, and velodromes sprang up around the country in the 1870s. Part of the fascination with bicycles was the opportunity they provided to combine
muscular strength with modern technology. The writer and cycling promoter Baudry de Saunier joyously proclaimed in 1894 “the birth of a new human type, the cyclist . . . a man made half of flesh and half of steel that only our century of science and iron could have spawned.”
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Road races like the Tour de France, which was first run in 1903, had the additional benefit of inspiring a sense of national unity. This marvelous new masculine type, the bicyclist, had no use for billowing hair that might interfere with his machinelike muscles and wind-defying velocity.

We have seen how gymnastic exercises were cultivated in early nineteenth-century Germany by the bearded nationalist Friedrich Ludwig Jahn as a means to regenerate German manhood and reinvigorate a conquered land. After Napoleon’s fall, the German states discouraged gymnastics because of its reformist overtones, but they reversed course in the 1840s. Danish and Swedish rulers blazed a new path, incorporating gymnastics into military training, with the Prussians and other German states following in their wake.
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This training, built around drilling as well as floor and apparatus exercises, was intended to develop balance, discipline, and strength. Like English team games, it was thought to cultivate correct moral qualities through physical discipline. Though team sports eventually dominated the attention of continental Europe, gymnastics played a key part in the formation of twentieth-century manliness, particularly by contributing to the rise of bodybuilding. By placing increased emphasis on muscles, and on ancient Greek ideals of youthful beauty, bodybuilders contributed decisively to the demise of the beard as the visual standard of manliness. The greatest of all bodybuilders was the son of a Prussian grocer, Eugen Sandow.