Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Volume 55, No. 343, May 1844

All things change; ours is the age of masses and classes, the last was the age of individuals. Half a dozen remarkable men then represented the London world, in politics, poetry, bon-mots, dining out, and gaming. Pitt and Fox, the Dukes of Queensberry and Norfolk, Sheridan and General Scott, were the substitutes for mankind in the great metropolis. George Brummell was the last of the beaus. The flame of beauism was expiring; but it flamed in its socket brighter than ever, and Beau Brummell made a more conspicuous figure in the supreme bon-ton of elegant absurdity, than any or all his predecessors. The only permanent beau on earth is the American savage. The Indians, who have been lately exhibiting their back-wood deformities in our island at shilling a-head, were prodigious dressers; Greek taste might probably have dissented from their principles of costume, but there could be no doubt of the study of their decoration. Their coiffeur might not altogether supersede either the Titus or the Brutus in the eye of a Parisian, but it had evidently been twisted on system; and if their drapery in general might startle Baron Stulz, it evidently cost as dexterous cutting out, and as ambitious tailoring, as the most recherché suit that ever turned a “middling man” into a figure for Bond Street.

But the charm which is the very soul of European fashion, is scorned by the Indian. Change—the “Cynthia of the minute,” the morning thought and midnight dream of the dilettanti in human drapery—has no captivation for the red man. He may like variety in his scalps or his squaws; but not a feather, not a stripe of yellow on one cheek, or of green on another, exhibits a sign of the common mutabilities of man. He struts in the plumes which his fathers wore, is attired in the same nether garments, exhibits the same head-gear, and decorates his physiognomy with the sane proportion of white-wash, red-lead, bear’s-grease, and Prussian blue.

Beauism, in England, scarcely goes farther back than the days of Charles II. It may be said that Elizabeth had her beaux; but the true beau being an existence of which no man living can discover the use, and which is, in fact, wholly useless except to his tailor and the caricaturists, the chevaliers of the time of Queen Bess are not entitled to the honour of the name. Raleigh, no doubt, was a good dresser; but then he could write and fight, and was good for something. Leicester is recorded as a superb dresser; but then he dabbled in statesmanship, war, and love-making, and of course had not much time on his hands. The Sedleys, Rochesters, and their compeers, had too much actual occupation, good and bad, to be fairly ranked among those gossamery ornaments of mankind; they were idle enough in their hearts for the purpose, but their lives were not shadows, their sole object was not self. They were more nice about swords than snuff-boxes and, if they were spendthrifts, their profusion was not limited to a diamond ring or a Perigord pie. They loved, hated, read, wrote, frolicked and fought; they could frown as well as smile, and see the eccentricity of their own follies as well as enjoy them. But the true beau is a beau-ideal, an abstraction substantialized only by the scissors, a concentrated essence of frivolity, infinitely sensitive to his own indulgence, chill as the poles to the indulgence of all others; prodigal to his own appetites, never suffering a shilling to escape for the behoof of others; magnanimously mean, ridiculously wise, and contemptibly clever; selfishness is the secret, the spring, and the principle of, par excellence, the beau.

In the brief introduction prefixed to the “Life,” some of those individuals who approached closest to perfection of old times are mentioned.   One of those was Sir George Hewitt, on whom Etheridge, the comic writer, sketched his Sir Fopling Flutter. This beau found a place in poetry as well as in prose,

“Had it not better been than thus to roam,To stay, and tie the cravat-string at home?To strut, look big, strike pantaloon, and swearWith Hewitt—D–me, There’s no action here?”

Wilson followed. He was a personage who first established the fashion of living by one’s wits. Returning from the army in Flanders with forty shillings in his pocket, he suddenly started into high life in the most dashing style, eclipsed every body by his equipage, stud, table, and dress. As he was not known at the gaming-table, conjecture was busy on the subject of his finances; and he was charitably supposed to have commenced his career by robbing a Dutch mail of a package of diamonds. Still he glittered, until involved in a duel with Mississippi Law; the latter financier, probably jealous of so eminent a rival, ran a rapier through his body.

The next on the list is Beau Fielding. He was intended for the bar, but intending himself for nothing, his pursuit was fashion. He set up a showy equipage, went to court, and led the life of “a man about town.” He was remarkably handsome, attracted the notice of Charles II., and reigned as the monarch of beauism. He was rapidly ruined, but repaired his fortune by marrying an heiress. She died; and the beau was duped by an Englishwoman, whom he married under the idea that she was a Madame Delaune, a widow of great wealth. Finding out the deception, he cast her off, and married the Duchess of Cleveland, though in her sixty-first year. For this marriage he was prosecuted, and found guilty of bigamy. He then became reconciled to his former wife, and died, in 1712, at the age of sixty-one. He was the Orlando of the Tatler.

Beau Edgeworth lives only in the record of Steele, in the 246th number of the Tatler, as a “very handsome youth who frequented the coffeehouses about Charing-Cross, and wore a very pretty ribbon with a cross of jewels on his breast.” Beau Nash completes the list of the ancient heroes, dying in 1761, at the age of eighty-eight—a man of singular success in his frivolous style; made for a master of the ceremonies, the model of all sovereigns of water-drinking places; absurd and ingenious, silly and shrewd, avaricious and extravagant. He created Bath; he taught decency to “bucks,” civility to card-players, care to prodigals, and caution to Irishmen! Bath has never seen his like again. In English high life, birth is every thing or nothing. Men of the lowest extraction generally start up, and range the streets arm-in-arm with the highest. Middle life alone is prohibited to make its approach; the line of demarcation there is like the gulf of Curtius, not to be filled up, and is growing wider and wider every day. The line of George Brummell is like that of the Gothic kings—without a pedigree; like that of the Indian rajahs—is lost in the clouds of antiquity; and like that of Romulus—puzzles the sagacious with rumours of original irregularity of descent. But the most probable existing conjecture is, that his grandfather was a confectioner in Bury Street, St James’s. We care not a straw about the matter, though the biographer is evidently uneasy on the subject, doubts the trade, and seems to think that he has thrown a shade of suspicion, a sort of exculpatory veil over this fatal rumour, by proving that this grandfather and his wife were both buried, as is shown by a stone, still to be seen by the curious, in St James’s church-yard. We were not before aware that Christian burial was forbidden to confectioners. The biographer further adds the convincing evidence of gentility, that this grandfather was buried within a few feet of the well-known ribald, Tom Durfey. Scepticism must now hang down its head, and fly the field.

We come to a less misty and remote period. In the house of this ancestor, who (proh dedecus!) let lodgings, lived Charles Jenkinson, then holding some nondescript office under government. We still want a history of that singularly dexterous, shy, silent,   and successful man; who, like Jupiter in Homer, did more by a nod than others by a harangue—made more as a scene-shifter than any actor on the stage of Westminster—continually crept on, while whole generations of highfliers dropped and died; and at length, like a worm at the bottom of a pool, started up to the surface, put on wings, and fluttered in the sunshine, Earl of Liverpool! The loss of such a biography is a positive injury to all students of the art of rising. Jenkinson was struck by the neatness of the autograph in which “Apartments to be Let” was displayed on the door; and probably, conscious that the “art of letting” was the true test of talents, made the young writer his amanuensis, and finally obtained for him a clerkship in the treasury. He was next in connexion with Lord North for the twelve years of that witty and blundering nobleman’s unhappy administration, and enjoyed no less than three offices, by which he netted L.2500 a-year. He was abused a good deal by the party-ink of his time; but the salary enabled him to bear spattering to any amount, and probably only increased Lord North’s sympathy for his fellow-sufferer, until that noble lord was suffocated in the public mire.

But after the crush of the minister, the man felt that his day was done; and he retired to “domestic virtue” as it is termed, took a good house in the country, enjoyed himself, and in 1794 died, leaving two sons and a daughter, and L.65,000 among them.

George Bryan Brummell, the second son, was born in June 1778. The biographer observes characteristically, that the beau avoided the topic of his genealogical tree with a sacred mystery. It appears that he avoided with equal caution all mention of the startling fact, that one of his Christian names was Bryan. It never escaped his lips; it never slipped into his signature; it was never suffered to “come between the wind and his nobility.” If it had by any unhappy chance transpired, he must have fainted on the spot, have fled from society, and hid his discomfiture in

“Deserts where no men abide.”

Brummell was a dandy by instinct, a good dresser by the force of original genius; a first-rate tyer of cravats on the involuntary principle. When a boy at Eton, in 1790, he acquired his first distinction not by “longs and shorts,” but by the singular nicety of his stock with a gold buckle, the smart cut of his coat, and his finished study of manners. Others might see glory only through hexameters and pentameters; renown might await others only through boating or cricket; with him the colour of his coat and the cut of his waistcoat were the materials of fame. Fellows and provosts of Eton might seem to others the “magnificoes” of mankind—the colossal figures which overtopped the age by their elevation, or eclipsed it by their splendour—the “dii majorum gentium,” who sat on the pinnacle of the modern Olympus; but Brummell saw nothing great but his tailor—nothing worthy of respect among the human arts but the art of cutting out a coat—and nothing fit to ensure human fame with posterity but the power to create and to bequeath a new fashion.

But the name of dandy was of later date; the age had not attained sufficient elegance for so polished a title; it was still buck or macaroni; the latter having been the legacy of the semi-barbarian age which preceded the eighteenth century. Brummell was called Buck Brummell when an urchin at Eton—a preliminary evidence of the honours which awaited him in a generation fitter to reward his skill and acknowledge his superiority. Dandy was a thing yet to come, but which, in his instance, was sure to come.

“The force of title could no further go—The ‘dandy was the heirloom of the beau.’”

Yet even in boyhood the sly and subtle style, the Brummellism of his after years, began to exhibit itself. A party of the boys having quarreled with the boatmen of the Thames, had fallen on one who had rendered himself obnoxious, and were about to throw him into the river. Brummell, who never took part in those affrays, but happened to pass by at the time, said, “My good fellows, don’t throw him into the river; for, as the man is in   a high state of perspiration, it amounts to a certainty that he will catch cold.” The boys burst into laughter, and let their enemy run for his life.

At Eton, however, he was a general favourite for his pleasantry, the gentleness of his manner, and the smartness of his repartee. He had attained tolerable scholarship, was in the fifth form in 1793, the year in which he left Eton, and wrote good Latin verses, an accomplishment which he partially retained to his last days. From Eton he went to Oriel, and there commenced that cutting system of which he so soon became the acknowledged master. He cut an old Eton acquaintance simply because he had entered at an inferior college, and discontinued visiting another because he had invited him to meet two students of a hall which he was pleased to consider obnoxious. In his studies he affected to despise college distinctions, but yet wrote for the Newdigate prize, and produced the second best poem. But his violation of college rules was systematic and contemptuous. He always ordered his horse at hall time, was the author of half the squibs, turned a tame jack-daw with a band on into the quadrangle to burlesque the master, and treated all proctors’ and other penalties with contempt. Such, at least, is the character given him by Mr Lister in Granby.

But he was now to commence a new career. In 1794 he was gazetted to a cornetcy in the Tenth Hussars, the gift of its colonel the Prince of Wales. Brummell’s own account of this origin of his court connexions is, that when a boy at Eton he had been presented to the Prince, and that his subsequent intimacy grew out of the Prince’s notice on that occasion. But a friend of his told the biographer that the Prince, hearing of the young Etonian as a second Selwyn, had asked him to his table, and given him the commission to attach him to his service. This was a remarkable distinction, and in any other hands would have been a card of fortune. He was then but sixteen; he was introduced at once into the highest society of fashion; and he was the favourite companion of a prince who required to be amused, delighted in originality, and was fond of having the handsomest and pleasantest men of the age in his regiment.

Brummell, though an elegant appendage to the corps, was too much about the person of the Prince to be a diligent officer. The result was, that he was often late on parade, and did not always know his own troop. However, he evaded the latter difficulty in general, by a contrivance peculiarly his own. One of his men had a large blue-tinged nose. Whenever Brummell arrived late, he galloped between the squadrons till he saw the blue nose. There he reined up, and felt secure. Once, however, it happened unfortunately that during his absence there was some change made in the squadrons, and the place of the blue nose was shifted. Brummel, on coming up late as usual, galloped in search of his beacon, and having found his old friend he reined up. “Mr Brummell,” cried the colonel, “you are with the wrong troop.” “No, no,” said Brummell, confirming himself by the sight of the blue nose, and adding in a lower tone—“I know better than that; a pretty thing, indeed, if I did not know my own troop!”

His promotion was rapid; for he obtained a troop within three years, being captain in 1796. Yet within two years he threw up his commission. The ground of this singular absurdity is scarcely worth enquiring into. He was evidently too idle for any thing which required any degree of regularity. The command of a troop requires some degree of attention from the idlest. He had the prospect of competence from his father’s wealth; and his absolute abhorrence of all exertion was probably his chief prompter in throwing away the remarkable advantages of his position—a position from which the exertion of a moderate degree of intellectual vigour, or even of physical activity, might have raised him to high rank in either the state or the army.

Of course, various readings of his resignation have been given; some referred it to his being obliged to wear hair-powder, which was then ceasing to be fashionable; others, more probably, to an original love for doing nothing. The reason which he himself assigned, was comic and characteristic. It was his disgust at   the idea of being quartered, for however short a time, in a manufacturing town. An order arrived one evening for the hussars to move to Manchester. Next morning early he waited on the Prince, who, expressing surprise at a visit at such an hour from him, was answered—“The fact is, your royal highness, I have heard that we are ordered to Manchester. Now, you must be aware how disagreeable this would be to me; I really could not go. Think! Manchester! Besides, you would not be there. I have therefore, with your permission, determined to sell out.”—“Oh, by all means, Brummell!” said the Prince; “do as you please.” And thus he stripped himself of the highest opportunity in the most showy of all professions before he was twenty-one.

He now commenced what is called the bachelor life of England; he took a house in Chesterfield Street, May Fair; gave small but exquisite dinners; invited men of rank, and even the Prince, to his table; and avoiding extravagance—for he seldom played, and kept only a pair of horses—established himself as a refined voluptuary.

Yet for this condition his means, though considerable, if aided by a profession, were obviously inadequate. His fortune amounted only to L.30,000, though to this something must be added for the sale of his troop. His only resources thenceforth must be play, or an opulent marriage.

Nature and art had been favourable to him; his exterior, though not distinguished, was graceful, and his countenance, though not handsome, was intelligent. He possessed in a certain degree the general accomplishments, and exactly in the degree, which produce a flattering reception in society. He was a tolerable musician, he used his pencil with tolerable skill, and he wrote tolerable verses; more would have been worse than useless. He dressed admirably, and, as his cheval de battaile, he talked with a keenness of observation and a dexterity of language, scarcely less rare than wit, and still more exciting among the exhausted minds, and in the vapid phraseology, of fashion.

His person was well formed, and his dress was a matter of extreme study. But it is rather libellous on the memory of this man of taste to suppose, that he at all resembled in this important matter the strutting display which we have seen in later times, and which irresistibly strikes the beholder with surprise, that any man capable of seeing himself in the glass could exhibit so strong a temptation to laughter; while to the more knowing in the affairs of costume, it betrays instantly the secret that the exhibitor is simply a walking placard for a tailor struggling for employment, and supplying the performer on the occasion with a wardrobe for the purpose. Brummell’s dress was finished with perfect skill, but without the slightest attempt at exaggeration. Plain Hessian boots and pantaloons, or top boots and buckskins, which were then more the fashion than they are now; a blue coat, and a buff coloured waistcoat—for he somewhat leaned to Foxite politics for form’s-sake, however he despised all politics as unworthy of a man born to give the tone to fashion—was his morning dress. In the evening, he appeared in a blue coat and white waistcoat, black pantaloons closely fitting, and buttoning tight to the ankle, striped silk stockings, and opera hat. We may thus observe how much Brummell went before his age; for while he thus originated a dress which no modern refinement has yet exceeded, and which contained all that is de bon ton in modern equipment, he was living in the midst of a generation almost studiously barbarian—the Foxite imitators of the French republicans—where every man’s principle was measured by the closeness of his approach to savagery; and nothing but the War interposed to prevent the sans-culottism alike of the body and the mind.

Brummell, though not possessing the patronage of a secretary of state, had the power of making men’s fortunes. His principal tailors were Schweitzer and Davidson of Cork street, Weston, and Meyer of Conduit street. Those names have since disappeared, but their memory is dear to dandyism; and many a superannuated man of elegance will give “the passing tribute of a sigh” to the incomparable neatness of their   “fit,” and the unrivaled taste of their scissors. Schweitzer and Meyer worked for the Prince, and the latter was in some degree a royal favourite, and one of the household. He was a man of genius at his needle; an inventor, who even occasionally disputed the palm of originality with Brummell himself. The point is not yet settled to whom was due the happy conception of the trouser opening at the ankle and closed by buttons. Brummell laid his claim openly, at least to its improvement; while Meyer, admitting the elegance given to it by the tact of Brummell, persisted in asserting his right to the invention. Yet if, as was said of gunpowder and printing, the true inventor is the man who first brings the discovery into renown, the honour is here Brummell’s, for he was the first who established the trouser in the Bond street world.

The Prince, at this period, cultivated dress with an ardour which threatened to dethrone Brummell himself, and his wardrobe was calculated to have cost L.100,000. But his royal highness had one obstacle to encounter which ultimately drove him from the field, and restricted all his future chances of distinction to wigs; he began to grow corpulent. A scarcely less formidable evil arose in his quarreling with Brummell. In the course of hostilities, the Prince pronounced the beau a tailor’s block, fit for nothing but to hang clothes on; while the retaliation came in the shape of a caricature, in which a pair of leather breeches is exhibited lashed up between the bed-posts, and an enormously fat man, lifted up to them, is making a desperate struggle to get his limbs properly seated in their capacity: another operation of a still more difficult nature, the making the waistband meet, still threatening to defy all exertion.

Brummell’s style was in fact simplicity, but simplicity of the most studied kind. Lord Byron defined it, “a certain exquisite propriety of dress.” “No perfumes,” the Beau used to say, “but fine linen, plenty of it, and country washing.” His opinion on this subject, however, changed considerably in after time; for he used perfumes, and attributed a characteristic importance to their use. Meeting a gentleman at a ball with whom he conversed for a while, some of the party enquired the stranger’s name. “Can’t possibly tell,” was the Beau’s answer. “But he is evidently a gentleman—his perfumes are good.” He objected to country gentlemen being introduced into Watier’s, on the ground “that their boots always smelt of horse-dung and bad blacking.”

His taste in matters of virtu was one of the sources of his profusion; but it always had a reference to himself. He evidently preferred a snuff-box which he could display in his hand, to a Raphael which he could exhibit only on his wall. His snuff-boxes were numerous and costly. But even in taking snuff he had his style: he always opened the box with one hand, the left. The Prince imitated him in this tour de grace.

A fashion always becomes more fashionable as it becomes more ridiculous. People cling to it as they pet a monkey, for its deformity. The high head-dresses of France, which must have been a burden, made the tour of Europe, and endured through a century. The high heels, which almost wholly precluded safe walking, lasted their century. The use of powder was universal until it was driven out of France by republicanism, and out of England by famine. The flour used by the British army alone for whitening their heads was calculated to amount to the annual provision for 50,000 people. Snuff had been universally in use from the middle of the seventeenth century; and the sums spent on this filthy and foolish indulgence, the time wasted on it, and the injury done to health, if they could all have been thrown into the common form of money, would have paid the national debt of England. The common people have their full share in this general absurdity. The gin drunk in England and Wales annually amounts to nearly twenty millions of pounds sterling; a sum which would pay all the poor rates three times over, and, turned to any public purpose, might cover the land with great institutions—the principal result of this enormous expenditure now being to fill the population with vice, misery, and madness.