BEAU BRUMMELL.

Otago Witness, Issue 2968, 1 February 1911, Page 79

BEAU BRUMMELL.

“The Beaux and the Dandies,” by Clare Jerrold, is a consoling as well as instructive book. It marks how far we have progressed, and how rapidly. It is startling to find how recent was the period in our social history when men still spent most of their time and their energies in the ignoble- art of bedecking themselves in fine cloth. For, startling as it is, the last days of the eighteen* h century, and even the early days of the nineteenth, still saw men walking about London who were as concerned with their clothes as the silliest and vainest woman. They wore small clothes of gorgeous velvets and satins ; there were ribbons at their knees; their cravats were of the finest lace; they carried muffs and fans; they carried scent bottles and jewelled spying-gkisses ; they made feminity and inanity of conversation and manner a cult,, “sitting,” as our author puts it, “ among the ladies, simpering, mincing, sniffing at scentbotlles.” About 1770 —not so very long ago—the fashion once more rose up of wearing large wigs. A wig worn by a man sometimes “ consisted of an immense padding, rising one or two feet, above the head, the hair being combed upwards over it. Three or four enormous curls lay hoiizontally to the face on either side, a bow large enough to hide the shoulders finished it at the back, and a little threecornered hat called a nivernoise surmounted the whole.” The creatures who thus bedecked themselves were known as the Macaronis. This is a, necessary preface to a study of the strange life of Beau Brummell. For, startling as it may sound, Beau Brummell—this supreme type of the dandy —must first be regarded as a reformer, bringing to cloth.es a simplicity which had been lost by his predecessors. He had first to reform the Prince Regent, for that worthy was in the habit of spending during his youth as much as £IO,OOO a year upon his clothes, and at his first Court ball was arrayed in “ a coat of pink silk, with white cuffs, a white silk waistcoat embroidered with differentcoloured foil and covered with French paste,” “ while,” adds our chronicler, ‘ • he wore a preposterous hat which was trimmed with 5000 steel beads in two rows, finished with a button and loop of the same beads.” Docs it not sound like the kind of dress a costermonger who had prospered would affect? Brummell, contends our author —and I think with justice—“was better dressed, better mannered, and a better gentleman ” than the “First Gentleman in Europe,” as the Prince Regent used to be called. And, moreover, Brummell—so again our author claims —“ picked the slovenly beaux out of their dirt and sartorial indifference, and showed them how a self-respecting man attended to his body and his appearance”: Brumrneii was so thoroughly a beau that he. escaped classification with those who approached but did net equal him. Ho was not a fop, for a fop is a fool, and Brummell was no fool. He was not a coxcomb, for a coxcomb desires attention before all things, and will wear any absurdity rather than be ignored ; and Brummell considered it the worst of taste to be so dressed that public attention was attracted. The whole sartorial gospel of Brummell —and it was not a bad philosophy either —was summed up in a conversation he had with one of his friends. “He was so well dressed,” said this friend, “that people turned to look at him.” “ Then,” answered Brummell, “ he was not well dressed.” What was this man in reality, and in the tabernacle of his inmost being? Was there anything behind the elaborate clothes, the weird ambition, the vacuous existence? Apparently there must have been a good deal. It was only Byron’s fun, of course, to declare, as he did, that there were early three great men in the early part of the nineteenth century —Napoleon, himself, and Brummell; but Brummell must have had somewhere a strong and. agreeable personality. For he started life with few advantages. His grandfather was a shopkeeper—some say a confectioner in St. James’s; his father, however, had got into the civil service through tfi© patronage of Lord Liverpool, one of his father’s lodgers, and had been careful enough to be able to leave £6500 to be distributed among his children. But the family still hovered on the borderland between trade and gentility, as they, were understood in those undemocratic days. Mi’s Searle, an aunt on his father’s side, was privileged to occupy a cottage in the Green Park and to keep _ some cows there, which supplied the milk to the surrounding nobility. And the legend is that it was during a visit he paid to this aunt that Bummell first made the acquaintance of the Prince of Wales, who had called to see the cows milked. However, his father’s fortune enabled Brummell to go to Eton, and afterwards to Oriel; and, apart from these advantages, he was evidently born with the instinct for clothes and for fine manners. The trade blood fought vainly against natural genius. All the accounts of his school days represent him as good-humoured, happy-go-lucky, and nnaffected. Gay, good-humoured, irresponsible, vain, impertinent ” —this is how his biographer sums up Brummell s character. Start in Life. — Brummell started in life in the army, bavin" got a commission through the Prince Regent; but he was incapable of steady exertion in any pursuit, was a very poor officer, and left the army early in life. From this time forward on© can trace no occupation beyond that of eating, drinking, and dressing. And yet he was not merely a dandy. Undoubtedly he was a wit of a. kind, a little rough and often impertinent, which seems to have been the fashion of his time, and his conversation must have been agreeable, for

mere good clothes would not have made T him a welcome guest at every dinner table in London. "His self-superiority in dress," says our author judiciously, " gave importance to his wit, and his sparkling conversation added importance to his ; dress." The best description of him is i to be found in the memoirs of Raikes, j a portion of which I quote:

He was always studiously and remarkably well dressed, never outre : and though considerable time and attention were devoted io his toilet, it never, when once accomplished, seemed to occupy his attention. His manners were easy, polished, and gentlemanlike, stamped with what St. Simon would call " l'usage du monde du plus grand et du meilleur," and regulated by that same good taste which he displayed in most things. No one was a more keen observer of vulgarism in others, or more piquant in bis criticisms, or more despotic w an arbiter elegantiarium; he could decide the fate of a young man just launched into the world by a single word. His c n w>as the general model, and when he had struck out a new idea he would smile at observing its gradual progress downwards from the highest to the lowest classes. Without many accomplishments, lie had a talent for drawing miniatures in watercolours. ... It is only justice to say that he was not only good-natured, but thoroughly good-tempered. I never remember to have seen him out of humour. His conversation, without having the wit and humour of Alvanley, was highly amusing and agreeable, replete with anecdotes, not only of the day but of society several years back, which his early introduction to Carlton House and to many of the Prince's older associates had given him the opportunity of knowing correctly. He had also a peculiar talent for ridicule (not ill-natured), but more properlv termed persiflage, which, if it did not enable him to laugh some people out of bad habits, was, I fear, too often exerted to laugh others out of good principles. He was liberal, friendly, serviable, without any shuffling or tortuous policy or meanness or manoeuvring- for underhand objects; himself of no rank or family, but living always with the highest and noblest in the country on terms of intimacy and familiarity, but without bassesse or truckling ; on the contrary, courted, applauded, and imitated, protecting rather than protected, and exercising an influence, a fascination in society which no one even felt a wish to resist. Brummell's Wit.— There are innumerable stories, not all well authenticated, as specimens of Brummell's wit; they suggest good nature, readiness, and a dash of impertinence; just the kind of things a man would say who had a sense of the ridiculous* and did not mind a little exaggeration, and could be so good-naturedly impertinent that people forgot the impertinence because of the good nature and the humour. Thus meeting one day Byng —another famous dandy,—who was riding in a trap with his French poodle by his side, Bruntmell, with whom he stopped to sneak, looking at the vehicle, exclaimed, " Ah, a family vehicle, I suppose," and such was the authority of the man that Byng was known as Foodie Byng ever afterwards. Asked why he had not married a lady to whom he had bsen attentive, Brummell replied: " My dear fellow, what could I do? It was impossible, for I found that she actually ate cabbage." But the impertinences which have become historic are those he used to the Prince Regent. For years the two were intimates, and the Prince paid court to the superior beau so far as to go and consult him frequently on the momentous question of dre.;s. Brummell, too, was one of the intimate circle that gathered round the Prince at Carlton House. Brummell had his faults, and the Prince, though heir to a throne, was not much of a Prince; but there must have been something in a man who, descending from a confectioner's shop in the generation immediately before his father, could obtain intimacy on almost equal terms with the heir to the throne. There is no certainty as to the real causes which estranged the two. The Prince Regent was a man easily offended, and he did not readily forgive; and in the world where Beau Brummell lived, moved, and had his being the hostility of the Prince Regent was a great disadvantage. The best authenticated version of the deadly offence the Beau gave to the Prince as that when the two and Lord Moira ware engaged in earnest conversation, the Prime said to the Beau, " Rinsr the bell," to which, unthinkingly, the Beau "Your Royal Highness is near to it. This is- more probable than the version which has passed into history, and was generally reported, which was that while they were seated at table together the Beau said to the Prince, " George, ring the bell." According to that version, the Prince, when the servant entered, told him at once to order Beau Brummell s carriage. So stoutly has this legendary account held its place that once, in the days of his decadence, the Beau was sought for very eagerly by some young tourists of his own country, who each asked for " ring the bell." The late Lord Houghton, who knew all the gossip of his time, used to say that the real explanation was that the Prince was sitting on a sofa near the bell when the Beau made the audacious request, " so that," as Lord Houghton said, "the speech of the familiar guest was rather uncourtly than ungentlemanlike." The other great story i.* also well graven in social history, though, perhaps, it also is an invention. One°day, so the story goes, at a fete in. Burlington House, the Prince Regent, passing along, studiously ignored the Beau, whereupon the Beau remarked to the man near him, " Henery, who is our fat friend?" Ruined by Gambling.— Brummell was ultimately ruined by his love of gafiabling. And hen the final

T scene in his downfall was enacted; hi* goods were sold, including a snuff-box containing a piece of paper with these words, : fatuous and dignified in their curious I way; “ This snuff-box was intended for ! th© Prince Regent if he had conducted himself with more propriety towards me.” " With more propriety ” —it is .a- true dan-, diacal touch. Calais was his asylum, and here he spent several miserable and weary years. The Prince Regent and he were destined to meet again, but in circumstances very different from those of their earlier rencontres. In 1820, ’ every- | body knows, the Prirlce Regent became King, and the poor, broken Beau hoped j against hope that he might find forgiveness, and that something might be I found by his now powerful and former friend to ease the miseries of his old age. The miseries were accumulating fast, for the Bean had nothing now left to live on But the generosity of his friends. “You ask me,” he writes, “ how I am going on in Calais. Miserably. lam exposed every I hour to all the turmoil and jeopardy that I attended my later days in England. I j bear up as well as I can, and when th© patience and mercy of my claimants are exhausted I shall submit without resistance to bread and water and straw. 1 cannot decamp a second time.” A last chance of being reconciled with George IV came when the King passed through Calais on his way to Hanover. This "is one of the episodes in the relations of | the two men which have caused the bitterest comment. Thackeray, who hated George IV with extraordinary vehemence, gives the episode as one "of the chief counts in his indictment of him. This ia Thackeray’s comment: On Wednesday he was very affectionate with that wretched Brummell, and on Thursday forgot him; cheated him even out of a snuff-box which he owed the poor dandy • saw him years afterwards in his downfall and poverty, when the bankrupt beau sent him . another snuff-box, with some of the snuff he used to love, as a piteous token of remembrance and- submission, and the King took the snuff, and ordered his horses, and drove on, and had not Hie grace to notice his old companion, favourite, rival, enemy, superior. The details of the story, indeed, maba it more pitiful. The King wanted snuff; Brummell was applied to, sent some snuff, aijd the King exclaimed, “ There is only one person I know of who can mix snull this way.” “lb is some of Mr Brumroell’s, your Majesty,” replied the Cbn- ! sul. But the King did not ask to sea him. Brummell had, however, friends to the last, and they sent him over with, fair regularity their donations. In the end he managed to get appointed to a Consulate at Caen. He gradually sank, however, and the tragedy of his end is well known. Ultimately he was taken—i it had to be by force, for be thought ' be was once more being sent to prison—• i to a private hospice in Caen, attended. I by nuns, and there he faded away, dying I peacefully, and is buried in “ the dreary, Protestant cemetery of that town —a wilderness of weed and fennel.” It is a , tragic story ; but how antediluvian it all j seems to be!—T.P.’s Weekly,