The Wits and Beaux of Society | Page 4

Life's Romance," if he cannot let himself go and
enjoy himself over Gilbert Gurney's river adventure. If the revival of
the Whartons' book were to serve no other purpose than to send some
laughter loving souls to the heady well-spring of Theodore Hook's
merriment, it would have done the mirthful a good turn and deserved
well of its country.
There is scarcely a queerer, or scarcely a more pathetic figure in the
world than that of Beau Brummell. He seems to belong to ancient
history, he and his titanic foppishness and his smart clothes and his
smart sayings. Yet is it but a little while since the last of his adorers, the
most devoted of his disciples passed away from the earth. Over in Paris
there lingered till the past year a certain man of letters who was very
brilliant and very poor and very eccentric. So long as people study
French literature, and care to investigate the amount of high artistic

workmanship which goes into even its minor productions, so long the
name of Barbey D'Aurevilly will have its niche--not a very large one, it
is true--in the temple. The author of that strange and beautiful story "Le
Chevalier des Touches," was a great devotee of Brummell's. He was
himself the "last of the dandies". All the money he had--and he had
very little of it--he spent in dandification. But he never moved with the
times. His foppishness was the foppishness of his youth, and to the last
he wandered through Paris clad in the splendour of the days when
young men were "lions," and when the quarrel between classicism and
romanticism was vital. He wrote a book about Beau Brummell and a
very curious little book it is, with its odd earnest defence of dandyism,
with its courageous championship of the arts which men of letters so
largely affect to despise.
Poor Beau Brummell. After having played his small part on life's stage,
his thin shade still occasionally wanders across the boards of the theatre.
Blanchard Jerrold wrote a play upon him, which was acted at the
Lyceum Theatre in 1859, when Emery played the title role. Jerrold's
play, which has for sub-title "The King of Calais," treats of that period
in Brummell's life in which he had retired across the channel to live
upon black-mail and to drift into that Consulship at Caen which he so
queerly resigned, to end a poor madman, trying to shave his own
peruke. Jerrold's is a grim play; either it or a version on the same lines
of Brummell's fall is being played across the Atlantic at this very hour
by Mr. Mansfield whose study of the final decay and idiotcy of the
famous beau is said to rival the impressiveness of his Mr. Hyde. Beau
Brummell is never likely to be quite forgotten. Folly often brings with
it a kind of immortality. The fool who fired the Temple of Ephesus has
secured his place in history with Aristides and Themistocles; the fop
who gave a kind of epic dignity to neck-clothes, and who asked the
famous "Who's your fat friend?" question, is remembered as a figure of
that age which includes the name of Sheridan and the name of Burke.
Another and a no less famous Beau steps to salute us from the pages of
the Whartons. Beau Nash is an old friend of ours in fiction, an old
friend in the drama. Our dear old Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel
about him yesterday; to-day he figures in the pages of one of the most

attractive of Mr. Lewis Wingfield's attractive stories. He found his way
on to the stage under the care of Douglas Jerrold whose comedy of
manners was acted at the Haymarket in the midsummer of 1834. There
is a charm about these Beaux, these odd blossoms of last century
civilisation, the Brummells and the Nashes and the Fieldings, so "high
fantastical" in their bearing, such living examples of the eternal verities
contained in the clothes' philosophy of Herr Diogenes Teufelsdröckh of
Weissnichtwo. Their wigs were more important than their wit; the
pattern of their waistcoats more important than the composition of their
hearts; all morals, all philosophy are absorbed for them in the
engrossing question of the fit of their breeches. D'Artois is of their kin,
French d'Artois who helped to ruin the Old Order and failed to re-create
it as Charles the Tenth, d'Artois whom Mercier describes as being
poured into his faultlessly fitting breeches by the careful and united
efforts of no less than four valets de chambre. But the English dandies
were better than the Frenchman, for they did harm only to themselves,
while he helped to ruin his cause, his party, and his king.
As we turn the pages, we come to one name