The Chin’s Disguise

To fuss over the precise geography of a man’s chin is to mistake the gate for the garden. We have fallen into the curious modern habit of assuming that a man’s character can be read in the arrangement of his hair, as if his soul were a phrenologist’s chart and his beard the key. The truth is that a man’s face is not a proclamation, but very often a disguise.

The great Victorian who cultivated a beard like a hedge might have been hiding a weak chin, but he might equally have been a man of such roaring and fertile vitality that his very face could not help but burst into foliage. The man who scrapes his chin to a perfect smoothness every morning may be a paragon of Roman discipline, but he may also be a rogue who knows that the surest way to seem trustworthy is to present a blank and polished surface to the world. A mask of respectability is still a mask.

A villain can be as smooth as a bishop, and a saint as shaggy as a bear.

And what of this new man, with the shadow of a beard that is neither one thing nor the other? You call it a lack of effort, but perhaps it is a declaration of a different kind of freedom. It is the face of a man who refuses to be either the tamed citizen or the wild hermit. He is content to exist in the twilight, acknowledging both the razor and the root. He keeps a garden that is not quite a wilderness, and not quite a lawn, but something in between, where things are permitted to grow, but not to conquer.

To seek for virtue in a razor, or vice in a whisker, is a magnificent folly. A villain can be as smooth as a bishop, and a saint as shaggy as a bear. The state of a man’s chin tells you what he did with his morning; it is the light in his eyes, the turn of his mouth, and the charity of his deeds that will tell you what he is doing with his life.