Judge — July 13, 1918 — page 6: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

outfit as are his ears. If custom decreed a daily trimming down of the ears, you and I would go prancing around with mutilated hearing-appendages and sneer at the fellow who should wear them unclipped. Take the bare-faced average man—yes, take him to the light and examine him. His chin is usually out of drawing; he has no facial middle-distance; his map is all mouth and nose and completely crowds the foreground. If he has any expression it is gen- erally that of a frog with a dis- tended stomach. The average mug of man is not a thing of beauty; it is too much like that creature with whose jawbone a certain party in the Bible was ignominiously slain. The male chin is too often slovenly modeled; the male nose is either too vividly present or too nebulous in contour. In fact the whole darned surfac is a mess that calls for some kind of cover. Nature long ago pro- vided the cover but mankind is now wasting its time and money in laying bare its own greatest weakness—the human snitch. Every time a shorn male lugs forth into the highways of civiliza- tion the clock of aesthetics is set back about two centuries. Persons with nice sensibilities must be shocked immeasurably by the nude frontages encountered in an afternoon’s walk in any American city. Hundreds of thou- sands of trousered gorillas—and the gorilla is not bearded, mark you—are right now cavorting around free and unrestrained, when they should be locked up for in- decent exposure. Radical! Absurd! Very well, Hypocrites. But listen again! I do not claim everything for the beneficent and protective whisker. otatall. In most cases whiskers can only perform the very humble task of hiding painfully glaring facial errata; there are certain faces which no bulk of hairy camouflage can make acceptable while the sun is up; to such, the most beautifully designed whisker would fail to give distinction or suggest character. One must be worthy of one’s whiskers; live up to them. Some men are dignity personified with only a spurt of floss upon the lower lip. Cardinal Richelieu carried the pride and power of the whole French people Looxrr Re sEveELt! WITHIN, A MAN pee Axp Boo BUT Proto by the Cam phell Studio Rex Beacn THe PLY ANCHOR “THe NATURAL FORCES ARE AMP: eD HAIR LIFIED BY NIMBUS ING HIS COUNTENANCE TH TARKING corGrous strox! W CANVAS HAT A BLANK FOR A WIISKERED MASTERPIECE! MOVIES F MIRSUTE RK LACK OF SUPPOR’ A GOOD WRITING-MAN LOST IN PROPER and the court of Louis XIII upon a tiny wisp of down athwart his chin, cleverly augmented by a well-balanced mustache. Our own Charles Evans Hughes probes suc- cessfully into the war-planes scan- dal and brings the facts to the surface, not so much by the force of his intellect as through the sheer compulsion of a luxuriant arborescence rooted upon his de- termined jaw. I have seen miracles worked with a pair of discreet sideboards. Take away your typ- ical English butler’s lateral lam- brequins and you bring him down to the level of a common serving per- son. Whiskers are great uplifters. While I do not go so far as to say brains on the inside of the head are dependent for their quality upon the papous adornment with- out, I do contend that with the latter, wabbly intellects are aided and upbraced; that a_ brilliant scholar minus whiskers adds to the luminosity of his intellectual stock when he adopts them; their strenuous influence and psychical suggestion are wholly plus. Take all the truly great men of the earth that have worn beards of one sort and another, line them up in ‘deadly parallel” with those that have won fame despite their denuded features, and you can count them five to one in favor of the historic whisker. Perhaps you object that this doesn’t hold good with the men of today who occupy the reserved Seats of the Mighty. It is a good point well taken, Antonio. But oh, boy, how you have let your- self in for it! Unwittingly you have placed your dainty little pink forefinger on the very pie crust of my contention. We have no really great men today because, forsooth we have cast off the whiskers of our forefathers! The men who stand at the top right now are, with a few excep- tions (which only prove the rule, anyhow), mustached, or goateed, at least. Heaven only knows how modern progress and learning would be accelerated if men could be made to understand the helpful influence of whiskers. Imagine the strides American literature would take if, for example, old Irvcobb should return to his first pale mustache and George Ade could be persuaded to grow a hispid chin hedge like that of forgotten Peter comicbooks.com