But the main use of a beard is not for health but for display, or at least as a hint of what lies behind the coverlet. The "propagandist beard" is as old as Nestor. By the length of it was a man's wisdom known: one cannot imagine a major prophet without a major beard, Mr. Bernard Shaw would hardly deny that when he was triumphantly impinging on the notice of theatrical London in the nineties it was an advantage to be a tweeded Barbarossa amid the smooth-chinned and stiff-shirted elegy ance of a "first night." Quite as much as the white lock of Whistler did the red beard of Shaw light up the town and play linkman to a personality.
By that time beards, which had long been the natural wrap of eminent Victorians from Karl Marx to W. G. Grace, were going out of fashion with the gentry and therefore acquiring a scarcity value and propagandist force. There was the disciplined Socialist beard which nodded briefly over Fabian pamphlets on the socialization of gas and water and the more showy Chelsea beard which took the winds of the riverside (or the eyes of the Cafe Royal) with lustre and display.
Where then were the beards, beards defiant, beards propagandist, to reassert themselves? Exiled from France they returned to certain quarters in England and became the badges of Leftward Ho! in Universities, at Progressive Film Societies, and in the hencoops of the Muses. Once more they announced the aspiring mind, But "fancy bushes" nicely sums the matter up and further suggests that propaganda, in beards as elsewhere, often covers up a vacuum, The bush of old, was the vintner's trade-mark or inn sign and so good wine was said to need no bush. Perhaps the same is true of good brains, which need no bushes, plain or fancy, to announce them.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.