Spirit of Chambers's Journal : $b Original tales, essays, and sketches, selected from that workChambers, Robert
General
Spirit of Chambers's Journal : $b Original tales, essays, and sketches, selected from that work
Chambers, Robert
English literature -- Scottish authors
All men are not agriculturists, horticulturists, or arboriculturists;
but yet almost all men are _cultivators_. By this it is meant that men
in general cultivate, or coax, or unduly appreciate and fondle, some
particular feature of their persons, or else, perhaps, some integument
connected with their persons, to such a degree as to be rather
conspicuous, while to every thing else they only give the ordinary
degree of attention. There are many features of human nature which
remain to be detected and described; and this is one—_Cultivations_.
So far as I am aware, no one ever thought of pointing it out to
mankind: the subject of cultivation has hitherto remained totally
_uncultivated_. So it shall be no longer.
Hair, as the only part of the person which actually grows like a
vegetable, is naturally a large subject of cultivation. The Cavaliers
long ago cultivated love-locks, which they kept hanging down in
graceful fashion from their temples. These locks, or curls, are now
changed for tufts or bunches of hair, which the young men cultivate
at the same place, and are ever shaking up and tedding, exactly as
if it were a crop of hay instead of hair. Mark a modern beau as he
walks along the street, and you will observe at one glance that the
principal part of the man—the heart—the sensorium—the cynosure—the
point from which all the rest evolves—the root of the man, in short,
is the tuft under the right rim of his hat. All the rest of him is a
mere pendulum, vibrating from this axis. As he walks along, he hardly
feels that any other part of him is in existence, besides that. But
he feels his tuft most intensely. Thought, feeling, every thing, lies
concentrated in that: head, body, and limbs, are all alike mere members
devolved from it. If you were to cut off the side-bunch of a modern
beau in his sleep, he would, for the time, be utterly ruined. It would
be like the polypus, deprived of every thing but a single leg; and he
would require several months of dormant existence—that is, retirement
from the streets—to let the better part of him grow out again from the
worse, which had remained behind. Let not the demure Puritan, however,
think that the joke lies all against the gay Cavalier or beau. There
may be as much of the sin of cultivation in the stroked and glossy hair
of the Roundhead or _plain man_, as in the love-locks and bunches of
their antipodes in sentiment. I have seen some men, who affected to be
very unaffected, cultivate a peak on the top and centre of their brows
as sedulously, and with as much inward gratulation on account of it,
as ever I saw a dandy cultivate a tuft, or train a side-curl. It must
be understood that there are cultivations of a negative character,
as well as of a positive, and he who is guiltless of cultivation in
his heart is alone guiltless. Next to curls stand whiskers. What
a field of cultivation have we there! The whisker is a bounty of
nature, which man does not like to refuse taking advantage of. The
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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