Beau Brummel

“ Doubtless these artificial 'humans' looked upon our friend as quite to be pitied that he was not 'one of us:' 'In their ultra dress, affected manners, drawling tones, and whey-faces, you might read the foolish inanity of an existence parallel in every respect to that of Beau Brummel, except that his was original absurdity, and theirs was folly on loan. ”

“ John Myer Bowers, in his later years, was far from being the Beau Brummel of his youthful days in New York, and came to be known in the village as a distinct character, ruggedly determined not to yield to the infirmities of old age. When his physical strength began to fail he kept a horse constantly in harness and standing at the door of Lakelands that he might ride to and from the village. ”

“ Beau Brummell.—Amongst the curious freaks of fortune there is none more remarkable in my memory than the sudden appearance, in the highest and best society in London, of a young man whose antecedents warranted a much less conspicuous career: I refer to the famous Beau Brummell. We have innumerable instances of soldiers, lawyers, and men of letters, elevating themselves from the most humble stations, and becoming the companions of princes and lawgivers ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Yet Brummell, though he adhered to the happy medium, and was moderate in his starch, was rigorous in his tie. If his cravat did not correspond to his wishes in its first arrangement, it was instantly cast aside. His valet was seen one morning leaving his chamber with an armful of tumbled cravats, and on being asked the cause, solemnly replied, “These are our failures.”
Perfection is slow in all instances; but talent and diligence are sure to advance. Brummell’s “tie” became speedily the admiration of the beau monde. ”

“ The cravat of Brummel was merely—starched! Henceforth starch was introduced into every cravat in Europe.
Brummel still lives, an obscure consul in a petty European town.
Physically there is something to command our admiration in the history of a man who thus lays at his mercy all ranks of men,—the lofty and the low, the great, the powerful and the vain: but morally and seriously, no character is more despicable than that of the mere man of fashion, Seeking nothing but notoriety, his path to that end is over the ruins of all that is worthy in our nature. He knows virtue only to despise it ”

“ I have a better one at home. Got it down by the bank. Smith, Dye and Company, Limited, Haberdashers. I can recommend the place if—if you ever go to London. Brummel's haberdasher—Brummel knew the best places. Depend upon him for that. Where he dealt, there you would hear the tramp of many feet. He made Schwitzer's fortune. Wonderful man, Brummel. Wonderful man, and I like him if he does owe me a thousand pounds thirty years past due. ”

“ The Prince, walking down St James’s Street with Lord Moira, and seeing Brummell approaching arm-in-arm with a man of rank, determined to show the openness of the quarrel, stopped and spoke to the noble lord with an apparent unconsciousness of ever having seen the Beau before. The moment he was turning away, Brummell asked, in his most distinct voice, “Pray, who is your fat friend?” Nothing could be more dexterously impudent; for it repaid the Prince’s pretended want of recognition precisely in his own coin, and besides stung him in the very spot where he was known to be most thin-skinned. ”

“ Unluckily, Brummell, soon after joining his regiment, was thrown from his horse at a grand review at Brighton, when he broke his classical Roman nose. This misfortune, however, did not affect the fame of the beau; and although his nasal organ had undergone a slight transformation, it was forgiven by his admirers, since the rest of his person remained intact. When we are prepossessed by the attractions of a favourite, it is not a trifle that will dispel the illusion; and Brummell continued to govern society, in conjunction with the Prince of Wales. ”

“ When Brummel fled from England, he left this secret a legacy to his country; he wrote on a sheet of paper, on his dressing-table, the emphatic words, "Starch is the man."
[219] up by a countryman, when he inquires, very coolly, if 't'other blackguard is not quite dead:' his amours are more distinguished by their number than attractions, and the first point is, not attachment, but notoriety; the lady always being the more desirable, in proportion to the known variety of her gallants ”

“ Brummel, whose career is one of the most extraordinary on record, must have exercised, during the period of his social reign, many qualities of conduct which rank among the highest endowments of our race. For an obscure individual, without fortune or rank, to have conceived the idea of placing himself at the head of society in a country the most thoroughly aristocratic in Europe, relying too upon no other weapon than well-directed insolence ”

“ The Brummel school—that is, the primrose-glove adventurers—were a very different order of men from the present-day fellows, who take a turn in Circassia or China, or a campaign with Garibaldi; and who, with all their defects, are men of mettle and pluck and daring. ”

“ Be pointed at in every company,
As was the little tailor that to death
Was hot in love with Queen Elizabeth.” Brummell, like that audacious schneider, had a soul that was at once given to the “confectioning of costume,” and consorting with the great.
Brummell, like many a steward’s son, was partly the victim of his father’s ambition. His sire was smitten with more desire to see him a gentleman than an honest man. The lad was brought up with as much reference to his future condition of gentility, as Miss Killmansegge was with respect to her present and future prospects of Pactolian hue. ”

“ Here is a home for you, Brummell."
"Does Mr. Brummell need a home?" asked Moore, waving his guests to the most comfortable of the chairs.
"Faith, the Beau is better at breaking them than making them," remarked the elder man, with a chuckle.
"Zooks!" drawled Brummell, "that reminds me of an execrable jest of which the Regent was guilty a fortnight ago. 'Why am I like a farmer?' he inquired of Percy Lovelace, who politely confessed that he could detect no resemblance. 'Because,' said his Highness, 'I keep a rake within reach,' and pointed with his monocle at Richard Brinsley." ”

“ All delicate spirits, to whatever art they turn, even if they turn to no art, assume an oblique attitude towards life. Of all dandies, Mr. Brummell did most steadfastly maintain this attitude. Like the single-minded artist that he was, he turned full and square towards his art and looked life straight in the face out of the corners of his eyes. ”

“ He thinks he’d be better off without a woman, than with one, ’specially with one as he can’t agree with. And she thinks any other man be better than Ned ‘Brumming.’ Such being the case, they think they had better part. Now, ‘Brumming’ wants a little money to take him over to the other side; and to rise it for him, his friends have been called together, and his woman is going to be put up at a raffle for fifty pounds—twenty-five chances at two pounds a chance. Mrs Brumming is willing to live with any man, as will support her, and use her kindly. ”

“ It is a vain and thankless task to defend Brummell from the charge of being a dandy. If one proof of his devotion to dress were wanted, it would be the fact that this hat, once stuck jauntily on one side of the wig, was never removed in the street even to salute a lady—so that, inasmuch as he sacrificed his manners to his appearance, he may be fairly set down as a fop.
The perfect artist could not be expected to be charitable to the less successful. ”

“ And sometimes that person became more distinct, less mystic and more companionable. Perhaps because imaginations have a way of following the line of least resistance, it took upon itself something of the form, something of the voice and bearing of Mr. Brumley. She recoiled from her own thoughts when she discovered herself wondering what manner of lover Mr. Brumley might make—if suddenly she lowered her defences, freed his suffocating pleading, took him to herself.
In my anxiety to draw Mr. Brumley as he was, I have perhaps a little neglected to show him as Lady Harman saw him. ”

“ Brumley was a gentleman of great and cultivated delicacy, that he liked the seemly and handsome side of things and dreaded the appearance of any flaw upon his prosperity as only a man trained in an English public school can do. It was intolerable to think of any hitch in this happy excursion which was to establish he knew not what confidence between himself and Lady Harman. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Haven't I as much right to bring my wife to Paris as you have? Give and take, if you please"——
"No, bless-ed," sagely and sarcastically interposed Mrs Brammel, "I ain't so rich as Mrs Allcraft; I can't dress so fine; we ain't sich gentle-folks"——
"Mr Brammel, pray let us have no more recrimination. I have met you here by the merest chance. It is my duty to speak to you at once, and very seriously, on your position. You are mistaken if you suppose that my own pleasure has brought me here; business—important, weighty business—is the sole cause, I can assure you." ”

“ Mr Brummell has told me,” continued the professor, “that to enter a coach was torture to him. ‘Conceive,’ said he, ‘the horror of sitting in a carriage with an iron apparatus, afflicted with the dreadful thought, the cruel apprehension, of having one’s leg crushed by the machinery. Why are not the steps made to fold outside? The only detraction from the luxury of a vis à vis, is the double distress! for both legs—excruciating idea!’”
Brummell’s first reform was the neckcloth. ”

“ They venture out 'neath moon and star Along the flats to feed; But when the dawn makes pink the sky And steals along the plain, The Brumby horses turn and fly Towards the hills again. The traveller by the mountain-track May hear their hoof-beats pass, And catch a glimpse of brown and black Dim shadows on the grass. The eager stockhorse pricks his ears And lifts his head on high In wild excitement when he hears The Brumby mob go by. Old Brumby asks no price or fee O'er all his wide domains: The man who yards his stock is free To keep them for his pains. ”

“ Shall not the painter show his work in galleries, the poet flit down Paternoster Row? Of rank, for its own sake, Mr. Brummell had no love. He patronised all his patrons. Even to the Regent his attitude was always that of a master in an art to one who is sincerely willing and anxious to learn from him.
Indeed, English society is always ruled by a dandy, and the more absolutely ruled the greater that dandy be. For dandyism, the perfect flower of outward elegance, is the ideal it is always striving to realise in its own rather incoherent way. ”

“ Brumley’s mind that this wonderful person could envy his Euphemia.
“Yes,” he said, “at least we had our Spring.”
“To be together,” said the lady, “and—so beautifully poor....”
There is a phase in every relationship when one must generalize if one is to go further. A certain practice in this kind of talk with ladies blunted the finer sensibilities of Mr. Brumley. At any rate he was able to produce this sentence without a qualm. “Life,” he said, “is sometimes a very extraordinary thing.” ”

“ Brumley had really been proposing an elopement and he was now entirely preoccupied with the idea of rescuing, obtaining and possessing Lady Harman for himself as soon as the law released her.
One may doubt whether this extensive change from a humorous conservatism to a primitive and dangerous romanticism is to be ascribed entirely to the personal charm, great as it no doubt was, of Lady Harman; rather did her tall soft dark presence come to release a long accumulating store of discontent and unrest beneath the polished surfaces of Mr. Brumley’s mind. ”

“ 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 ”