_For the Table Book._
Barbers are distinguished by peculiarities appertaining to no other
class of men. They have a _caste_, and are a race of themselves. The
members of this ancient and gentle profession--foul befall the libeller
who shall designate it a _trade_--are mild, peaceable, cheerful, polite,
and communicative. They mingle with no cabal, have no interest in
factions, are “open to all parties, and influenced by none;” and they
have a good, kind, or civil word for everybody. The cheerful morning
salutation of one of these cleanly, respectable persons is a “handsell”
for the pleasures of the day; serenity is in its tone, and comfort
glances from its accompanying smile. Their small, cool, clean, and
sparingly-furnished shops, with sanded floor and towelled walls,
relieved by the white-painted, well-scoured shelves, scantily adorned
with the various implements of their art, denote the snug system of
economy which characterises the owners. Here, only, is the looking-glass
not an emblem of vanity: it is placed to reflect, and not to flatter.
You seat yourself in the lowly, antique chair, worn smooth by the backs
of half a century of beard-owners, and instantly feel a full repose from
fatigue of body and mind. You find yourself in attentive and gentle
hands, and are persuaded that no man can be in collision with his shaver
or hair-dresser. The very operation tends to set you on better terms
with yourself: and your barber hath not in his constitution the
slightest element of difference. The adjustment of a curl, the clipping
of a lock, the trimming of a whisker, (that much-cherished and
highly-valued adornment of the face,) are matters of paramount
importance to both parties--threads of sympathy for the time, unbroken
by the divesture of the thin, soft, ample mantle, that enveloped you in
its snowy folds while under his care. Who can entertain ill-humour, much
less vent his spleen, while wrapt in the symbolic vestment? The veriest
churl is softened by the application of the warm emollient brush, and
calmed into complacency by the light-handed hoverings of the comb and
scissors. A smile, a compliment, a remark on the weather, a diffident,
side-wind inquiry about politics, or the passing intelligence of the
day, are tendered with that deference, which is the most grateful as
well as the handsomest demonstration of politeness. Should you, on
sitting down, half-blushingly request him to cut off “as large a lock as
he can, merely,” you assure him, “that you may detect any future change
in its colour,” how skilfully he extracts, from your rather thin head of
hair, a graceful, flowing lock, which self-love alone prevents you from
doubting to have been grown by yourself: how pleasantly you contemplate,
in idea, its glossiness from beneath the intended glass of the
propitiatory locket. A web of delightful associations is thus woven; and
the care he takes to “make each particular hair to stand on end” to your
wishes, so as to let you know he surmises your destination, completes
the charm.--We never hear of people cutting their throats in a barber’s
shop, though the place is redolent of razors. No; the ensanguined spots
that occasionally besmirch the whiteness of the revolving towel is from
careless, unskilful, and opiniated individuals, who mow their own
beards, or refuse to restrain their risibility. I wonder how any can
usurp the province of the barber, (once an almost exclusive one,) and
apply unskilful, or unpractised hands so near to the grand canal of
life. For my own part, I would not lose the daily elevation of my tender
nose, by the velvet-tipped digits of my barber--no, not for an
independence!
The genuine barber is usually (like his razors) well-tempered; a man
unvisited by care; combining a somewhat hasty assiduity, with an easy
and respectful manner. He exhibits the best part of the character of a
Frenchman--an uniform exterior suavity, and _politesse_. He seems a
faded nobleman, or _émigré_ of the old _régime_. And surely if the souls
of men transmigrate, those of the old French _noblesse_ seek the
congenial soil of the barber’s bosom! Is it a degradation of worthy and
untroubled spirits, to imagine, that they animate the bodies of the
harmless and unsophisticated?
In person the barber usually inclines to the portly; but is rarely
obese. His is that agreeable plumpness betokening the man at ease with
himself and the world--and the utter absence of that fretfulness
ascribed to leanness. Nor do his comely proportions and fleshiness make
leaden the heels, or lessen the elasticity of his step, or transmute his
feathery lightness of hand to heaviness. He usually wears powder, for
it looks respectable, and is professional withal. The last of the almost
forgotten and quite despised race of pigtails, once proudly cherished by
all ranks--now proscribed, banished, or, if at all seen, diminished in
stateliness and bulk, “shorn of its fair proportions,”--lingers fondly
with its former nurturer; the neat-combed, even-clipped hairs, encased
in their tight swathe of black ribbon, topped by an airy bow, nestle in
the well-clothed neck of the modern barber. Yet why do I call him
_modern_? True, he lives in our, but he belongs to former times, of
which he is the remembrancer and historian--the days of bags, queues,
clubs, and periwigs, when a halo of powder, pomatum, and frizzed curls
encircled the heads of our ancestors. That glory is departed; the brisk
and agile tonsor, once the genius of the toilet, no longer directs, with
the precision of a cannoneer, rapid discharges of scented atoms against
bristling batteries of his own creation. “The _barber’s_ occupation’s
gone,” with all the “pride, pomp, and circumstance of glorious _wigs_!”
Methinks I detect some unfledged reader, upon whose head of hair the sun
of the eighteenth century never shone, glancing his “mind’s eye” to one
of the more recent and fashionable professors of the art of
“_ciseaurie_”--one of the chemical perfumers, or self-esteemed
practitioners of the present day, in search of an exemplification of my
description:--he is at fault. Though _he_ may deem Truefit or Macalpine
models of skill, and therefore of description, I must tell him I
recognise none such. I speak of the last generation, (between which and
the present, Ross, and Taylor of Whitechapel, are the connecting links,)
the last remnants of whom haunt the solitary, well-paved, silent
corners, and less frequented streets of London--whose windows exhibit no
waxen busts, bepainted and bedizened in fancy dresses and flaunting
feathers, but one or two “old original” blocks or _dummies_, crowned
with sober-looking, respectable, stiff-buckled, brown wigs, such as our
late venerable monarch used to wear. There is an aboriginal wig-maker’s
shop at the corner of an inn-yard in Bishopsgate-street; a “repository”
of hair; the window of which is full of these primitive caxons, all of a
sober brown, or simpler flaxen, with an occasional contrast of rusty
black, forming, as it were, a finis to the by-gone fashion. Had our
first forefather, Adam, been bald, he could not have worn a more simply
artificial imitation of nature than one of these wigs--so frank, so
sincere, and so _warm_ an apology for want of hair, scorning to deceive
the observer, or to crown the veteran head with adolescent curls. The
ancient wig, whether a simple scratch, a plain bob, or a splendid
periwig, was one which a man might modestly hold on one hand, while with
the other he wiped his bald pate; but with what grace could a modern
wig-wearer dismount a specific deception, an elaborate imitation of
natural curls to exhibit a hairless scalp? It would be either a censure
on his vanity, or a sarcasm on his otherwise unknown deficiency. The old
wig, on the contrary, was a plain acknowledgment of want of hair;
avowing the comfort, or the inconvenience, (as it might happen,) with an
independent indifference to mirth or pity; and forming a decent covering
to the head that sought not to become either a decoration or deceit.
Peace to the _manes_ of the primitive artificers of human hair--the true
skull-thatchers--the architects of towering toupees--the engineers of
flowing periwigs!
The wig-makers (as they still denominate themselves) in Lincoln’s-inn
and the Temple, are quite of the “old school.” Their shady, cool,
cleanly, classic recesses, where embryo chancellors have been measured
for their initiatory forensic wigs; where the powdered glories of the
bench have ofttimes received a _re_-revivification; where some “old
Bencher” still resorts, in his undress, to have his nightly growth of
beard shaven by the “particular razor;” these powder-scented nooks,
these legal dressing-closets seem, like the “statutes at large,” to
resist, tacitly but effectually, the progress of innovation. They are
like the old law offices, which are scattered up and down in various
corners of the intricate maze of “courts,” constituting the
“Temple”--unchangeable by time; except when the hand of death removes
some old tenant at will, who has been refreshed by the cool-borne
breezes from the river, or soothed by the restless monotony of the
plashing fountain, “sixty years since.”--But I grow serious.--The barber
possesses that distinction of gentleness, a soft and white hand, of
genial and equable temperature, neither falling to the “zero” of
chilliness, nor rising to the “fever heat” of perspiration, but usually
lingering at “blood heat.” I know not if any one ever shook hands with
his barber: there needs no such outward demonstration of goodwill; no
grip, like that we bestow upon an old friend returned after a long
absence, by way of rivet, as it were, to that link in the chain of
friendship. His air of courtesy keeps a good understanding floating
between him and his customers, which, if ruffled by a hasty departure,
or dismissal, is revived the next day by the sun-light of his morning
smile!
The barber’s hand is unlike that of any other soft hand: it is not
flabby, like that of a sensualist; nor arid, and thin, like a student’s;
nor dead white, like that of a delicate female; but it is _naturally_
warm, of a glowing, transparent colour, and of a cushiony, elastic
softness. Beneath its conciliatory touch, as it prepares the skin for
the sweeping course of the razor, and its gentle pressure, as it
inclines the head to either side, to aid the operation of the scissors,
a man may sit for hours, and feel no weariness. Happy must he be who
lived in the days of long, or full-dressed hair, and resigned himself
for a full hour to the passive luxury of hair-dressing! A morning’s
toilette--(for a gentleman, I mean; being a bachelor, I am uninitiated
in the arcana of a lady’s dressing-room)--a morning’s toilette in those
days was indeed an important part of the “business of life:” there were
the curling-irons, the comb, the pomatum, the powder-puff, the
powder-knife, the mask, and a dozen other requisites to complete the
elaborate process that perfected that mysterious “frappant, or
tintinabulant appendage” to the back part of the head. Oh! it must have
been a luxury--a delight surpassing the famed baths and cosmetics of the
east.
I have said that the barber is a gentle man; if not in so many words, I
have at least pointed out that distinguishing trait in him. He is also a
humane man: his occupation of torturing hairs leaves him neither leisure
nor disposition to torture ought else. He looks as respectable as he is;
and he is void of any appearance of deceit or cunning. There is less of
personality or egotism about him than mankind in general: though he
possesses an idiosyncrasy, it is that of his class, not of himself. As
he sits, patiently renovating some dilapidated peruke, or perseveringly
presides over the developement of grace in some intractable bush of
hair, or stands at his own threshold, in the cleanly pride of white
apron and hose, lustrous shoes, and exemplary jacket, with that studied
yet seeming disarrangement of hair, as though subduing, as far as
consistent with propriety, the visible appearance of technical skill--as
he thus, untired, goes the never-varying round of his pleasant
occupation, and active leisure, time seems to pass unheeded, and the
wheel of chance, scattering fragments of circumstance from the rock of
destiny, continues its relentless and unremittent revolution, unnoticed
by him. He hears not the roar of the fearful engine, the groans and
sighs of despair, or the wild laugh of exultation, produced by its
mighty working. All is remote, strange, and intricate, and belongs not
to him to know. He dwells in an area of peace--a magic circle whose area
might be described by his obsolete sign-pole!
Nor does the character of the barber vary in other countries. He seems
to flourish in unobtrusive prosperity all the world over. In the east,
the clime most congenial to his avocations, the voluminous beard makes
up for the deficiency of the ever-turbaned, close-shorn skull, and he
exhibits the triumph of his skill in its most special department.
Transport an English barber to Samarcand, or Ispahan, and, saving the
language, he would feel quite at home. Here he reads the newspaper, and,
unless any part is contradicted by his customers, he believes it all: it
is his oracle. At Constantinople the chief eunuch would confide to him
the secrets of the seraglio as if he were a genuine disciple of Mahomet;
and with as right good will as ever old “gossip” vented a bit of scandal
with unconstrained volubility of tongue. He would listen to, aye and put
faith in, the relations of the coffee-house story-tellers who came to
have their beards trimmed, and repaid him with one of their inventions
for his trouble. What a dissection would a barber’s brain afford, could
we but discern the mine of latent feuds and conspiracies laid up there
in coil, by their spleenful and mischievous inventors. I would that I
could unpack the hoarded venom, all hurtless in that “cool grot,” as
destructive stores are deposited in an arsenal, where light and heat
never come. His mind admits no spark of malice to fire the train of
jealousy, or explode the ammunition of petty strife; and it were well
for the world and society, if the intrigue and spite of its inhabitants
could be poured, like the “cursed juice of Hebenon,” into his ever-open
ear, and be buried for ever in the oblivious chambers of his brain. Vast
as the caverned ear of Dionysius the tyrant, his contains in its
labyrinthine recesses the collected scandal of neighbourhoods, the
chatter of households, and even the crooked policy of courts; but all is
decomposed and neutralized there. It is the very quantity of this
freight of plot and detraction that renders him so harmless. It is as
ballast to the sails of his judgment. He mixes in no conspiracy,
domestic or public. The foulest treason would remain “pure in the last
recesses of _his_ mind.” He knows not of, cares not for, feels no
interest in all this material of wickedness, any more than the
unconscious paper that bears on its lettered forehead the “sixth
edition” of a bulletin.
Amiable, contented, respected race!--I exclaim with Figaro, “Oh, that I
were a happy barber!”