ABSALOM: BEAUTIFUL AND BAD. 133 when the latter, regarding him with the look of pity that a lion might cast on a bellicose roebuck, observes that his pastors and masters have educated him badly, and that, had the speaker a rod at hand, he would repair their negligence. It is not a question of rods, the student replies in a white heat of anger, but of swords; and for cold steel he is ready, whensoever the other may please. "Vous mériteriez encore une férule pour ce propos," returns the elder man, whose sang-froid railleur seems to increase with the exasperation of his antagonist. The war of words resembles that between Antonio and the sensitive young poet in Goethe's Torquato Tasso: "Ant. Thou'rt still so young that wholesome chastisement Tasso. Not young enough to bow to idols down, Yet old enough to conquer scorn with scorn." G ABSALOM: BEAUTIFUL AND BAD. 2 SAMUEL XIV. 25. OOD looks, as well as grace of manner, and the studied artifice of winning words, may well be supposed to have aided Absalom in stealing the hearts of the men of Israel. From his father he stole them, and gloried in the theft. As beautiful as bad, seems to have been this son of David. In all Israel there was none to be so much praised as Absalom for his beauty: from the sole of his foot even to the crown of his head, there was no blemish in him. No skin-deep blemish. Spots and blemishes of a moral sort there were upon him, enough and to spare. In that respect, perhaps, the language of the prophet would not be too severe to describe his tainted frame: "from the sole of the foot even unto the head there is no soundness in it; but wounds, and bruises, and putrifying sores." Outwardly he was, beyond his fellows, right fair to see. And what appears to have been accounted the crowning glory of the crown of his head, was the long hair that hung so thick and heavy across his shoulders. "When he polled his head, (for it was at every year's end that he polled it: because the hair was heavy on him, therefore he polled it :) he weighed the hair of his head at two hundred shekels after the king's weight." Probably, in his pride and pomp of beauty, he would, if he could, have had the very hairs of his head all numbered, as well as weighed. In a fatal sense, and too literally, they were a snare unto him at the last, when his mule carried him, in the panic of a lost battle, through the wood of Ephraim, under the thick boughs of a great oak, and his head caught hold of the oak, and he was taken up between the heaven and the earth, and the mule that was under him went away, and the darts of Joab pierced him to the heart, while he was yet alive in the midst of the oak. A different story had that tree to tell from that of another royal oak of later times. One remembers, however, that in Charles the Second's days it was the fashion of the court-gallant to let his hair, if it would, fall over his shoulders in luxurious ringlets. Mr. Pepys is naïf, as usual, on the subject, when he records in his diary (May 11, 1661), a visit to the hairdresser's, and the result," in which I am lately become a little curious, finding that the length of it do become me very much."* According to Plutarch, the Lacedemonian custom of wearing long hair was derived from the institution of Lycurgus, who said that it makes the handsome handsomer still, and to the ugly gives the advantage of looking imposingly terrible. Homer shows us the martial sons of Euboea, "Down whose broad shoulders falls a length of hair." Milton is careful to give Adam a wealth of hair, but not too long; for whereas Eve is pictured with dishevelled golden tresses, down to the slender waist descending, as a veil; his * Sir Andrew Ague-cheek puts the same remark interrogatively : "Sir And. O had I but followed the arts! Sir To. Then hadst thou had an excellent head of hair. Sir And. Why, would that have mended my hair? Sir To. Past question; for thou seest it will not curl by nature. Twelfth Night, Act I. Sc. 3. CAPILLARY ATTRACTION. 66 hyacinthine locks, 135 Round from his parted forelock manly hung Clustering, but not beneath his shoulders broad." The same poet's Agonistes has full Scripture warrant for all the store he sets by his locks unshorn, the pledge of his unviolated vow-his "boisterous locks," as the insulting Harapha calls them, no worthy match for valour such as his, the blustering giant's, to assail, but by the barber's razor best subdued; while Manoah, on the other hand, fondly bethinks him of Samson as he looked in his prime, "And on his shoulders waving down those locks That of a nation armed the strength contained.” The poet Ion is quoted by Plutarch in his portraiture of Cimon, as showing that hero to have been of handsome person, tall and majestic, and with an abundance of hair which curled adown his broad shoulders. Cincinnatus was the name said to have been bestowed on the Dictator, Lucius Quinctius, because he wore his hair in long curling locks (cincinni)—as long and full, but not quite so straight and limp, as the hair of Chaucer's Pardoner, who hadde heer as yelwe as wex, But smothe it heng, as doth a strike of flex; By unces hynge his lokkes that he hadde, Chaucer, by the way, was observant of such matters; the subject had its capillary attraction for him. Contrast his Arcite, boasting of "My berd, myn heer that hangeth longe adoun, That never yit ne felt offensioun Of rasour ne of schere," with the Reeve whose 66 heere was by his eres neighe i-shorn, His top was dockud lyk a preest biforn." It is on record that Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury, went so far as to pronounce an anathema of excommunication on all who wore long hair, for which pious zeal he was much commended; and again, that Serlo, a Norman bishop, acquired great honour by a sermon which he preached before Henry I. in 1104, against long curled hair, with which discourse the king and his courtiers were so much affected, that they consented to sacrifice the flowing ringlets* of which they had been so vain. The prudent prelate is said to have given them no time to change their mind; for incontinently he pulled forth from his sleeve a pair of shears, and performed the operation with his own hand. A canon was lately quoted as still extant, of the date of 1096, importing that such as wore long hair should be excluded from the Church while living, and denied her prayers when dead. Yet Dr. Wynter tells us how very much long hair was respected during the "dark ages;" how at the beginning of the French monarchy the people chose their kings by the length of their locks; and how in our own island it was equally esteemed: the Danish officers quartered upon the English in the reign of Ethelred the Unready, are said to have won the hearts of the ladies by the length and beauty of their hair, "which they combed at least once a day." That the clergy wore their hair short, an exception to a rule, is regarded as a token of mortification. Their endeavour to impose the like penance on the laity, and so to make the exception the rule, was strenuous from time to time, being fitfully renewed at sundry times and in divers manners, and expressed in ordinances so complex and conflicting that a derisive critic counselled the continued wearing of long hair until the Church should have settled what short hair really was. Modern dissertators on the vexed question still draw on Dr. * The Ettrick Shepherd of the Noctes stoutly avers that a man cannot have too much hair on his head, provided always it does not grow straight and without a curl in it. When Christopher North quizzes him on having such a crop as he never saw in his life, "It's verra weel," retorts the shepherd, "for you that's bald to talk about a crap o' hair. But the mair hair a man has on his head the better, as lang as it's touzy—and no in candlewick fashion."-Noctes Ambrosianæ, i. 353.-Those who have once seen the leonine head of Professor Wilson, can scarcely forget his flowing mane. It was one of the sights of the streets of Edinburgh, that wealth of tawny hair. LOOSE AND FLOWING LOCKS. 137 Hall's treatises, published in 1643, on the "Loathsomeness of Long Hair;" and the virulence of protesting Roundheads was at least equal to what had been that of the medieval priests. If in this medley of annotations we refrain from entering upon the question of St. Paul's precept respecting long hair masculine, it is, perhaps, mainly——because of the angels. But the tangle of Absalom's capillatium may account for, if not excuse, with so vagrant a pen as the present, a few more random notes by the way de capillatis. The little head, gaie, ironique et satyresque, of the President de Brosses, is described by Diderot as lost in the immensity of a forest of hair which "obfuscated" it. A big head was Mirabeau's, but proportionally bigger still was the énorme chevelure which crowned and covered it—that chevelure immense said to have been endowed with such vitality that, towards the close of his last illness, the doctor on entering his bedroom would, before he felt his patient's pulse, first of all inquire of the valet how his master's hair was to-day,—comment était ce jour-là la chevelure de son maître; whether it was crisp and curling of itself (si elle se tenait et frisait d'elle-même), or soft, limp, and depressed. Long hair, more or less disorderly, has been thought a characteristic of the dreamy poet; whether of the growth favoured by Shenstone, who, like Southey in a later generation, was noted at the University for what was then accounted the odd practice of wearing his own hair-which *So Wesley at Oxford, in his day, would not be at the expense of having his hair dressed; he wore it remarkably long, and flowing loose upon his shoulders. His mother objected to this as bad for his health, and urged him to have it taken off; but he demurred to the expense, which would lessen his means of relieving the needy. But was there not a middle course for John, between wearing it at such effusive length, and having it taken off altogether? Samuel suggested as a middle course the having it cut shorter, by which means the singularity of his appearance would be lessened, without entrenching upon his meritorious economy;" and for once John complied. 66 In a curious letter written by Wesley in 1769, to one of his Irish preachers, this bit of advice or direction is given: "Do not cut off your hair; but clean it, and keep it clean." The venerable father of Methodism practised each clause of the precept. His flowing white locks were a distinctive part of him: he cut them not off, but cleaned, and kept them clean. |