An artist who had volunteered to be an auxiliary fireman has been rejected from that service on the ground of his beard, with which he refused to part, when commanded, for two reasons. In the first place, he deemed it to be clement of the Ego; secondly, he regarded it a portion of his personality, an inseparable
of propaganda," as he put it; That last word, fessional asset, a trade sign, so ugly, so hardly worked, and such a travesty of correct Latin in its common English usage, has been applied to almost everything in these times from poetry to cooking. Perhaps adver-fisement would be a simpler and more satis-ila ce cis reference to personaliory term, whether in refer
In Great Britain professional men are supposed not to advertise—or, if the phrase must be used, not to practise personal propaganda. Needless to say there are ways and means of evading this. It may be worth while to join clubs, to attend certain functions, to have foibles of dress or barbering, to catch the chairman's eye and the photographer's lens, to make friends in Fleet Street, to stage oneself as an up-and-coming fellow, a good mixer, great democrat, or queer card.
But the painter's tradition of Bohemian bedizenment has by no means wholly vanished. The beard is still for him confessedly a "form of propaganda," which simply means that if the bourgeois took to growing these articles the artist would rush to the razor, You cannot easily foster and market an artistic Personality except by remaining in opposition. The beard can be an admirable emblem of defiance: witness Captain Kettle and the many bearded English sea-dogs. When nearly all men wore beards, and to be clean-shaven was scarcely thinkable, it was the obvious course for an arbiter of elegance and fancier of self-assertion to exhibit an unusual kind of beard. Thus the Earl of Essex, when most of his fellows wore the pointed beard, reverted to the spade-shaped article as used by King Henry VIII. No doubt this question of cut had propagandist values, as an up-to-date artist would say.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.