Chapter VI: The New Dandyism

“The future belongs to the dandy. It is the exquisites who are
going to rule.”--OSCAR WILDE.

Love of town is a human passion which may not be suppressed by advocates of the Simple Life and the Return to Nature, even though they bedeck their propaganda with words of flame. Such enthusiasts can never be more than apostles of a marginal gospel, attracting the few and, perhaps, the ill-starred. To the average man they will be nothing but curious folk, a little unbalanced--what are called cranks. For human life gravitates townwards; even when it emigrates, and settles in lands of prairie and forest, cities spring up about it; nothing, indeed, is more certain than the fact that, at the touch of humanity, the wilderness blossoms with the town. Normal man has, however, always loved to toy with the idea of the country, with its whispers of romance and health. But during the Eighteen Nineties, as in one or two other periods in history, art threw a glamour over the town, and all the artificial things conjured up by that word. Poets, it is true, did not abandon the pastoral mood, but they added to it an enthusiasm for what was urban. Where, in the past, they found romance only in wild and remote places, among what are called natural things, they now found romance in streets and theatres, in taverns and restaurants, in bricks and mortar and the creations of artificers. Poets no longer sought inspiration in solitude, they invoked the Muses in Fleet Street and the Strand. And whilst not entirely abandoning, as I say, the old themes which they have always and will always sing, they discovered a fresh delight in more sophisticated matters. These poets sang not only to “Corinna’s going a-maying,” but they found a subtle joy in acclaiming “Nora of the Pavement.” It were unkind to say that they ceased hearing the morning stars singing together, but they certainly heard also, and with equal delight, the “Stars” of the music halls. Richard Le Gallienne, for instance, ceased for a while his consideration of the lilies of the field to consider “the Iron Lilies of the Strand”; John Davidson, with his _Eclogues_, became the Virgil of Fleet Street; and Arthur Symons became the Herrick of the Theatre of Varieties.

In all this awakening interest in urban things, it is not surprising to learn that London inspired a renaissance of wonder, one phase of which found sympathetic expression in Richard Le Gallienne’s

“London, London, our delight,
Great flower that opens but at night,
Great city of the midnight sun,
Whose day begins when day is done.

Lamp after lamp against the sky
Opens a sudden beaming eye,
Leaping a light on either hand,
The iron lilies of the Strand.”

Not that the wonder of London was in any sense a new thing, even in literature. The capital city had inspired many a song, and many a purple patch of prose. But the men of the Nineties certainly added a new meaning to their worship of the great town. They reasserted the romance of London as an incident in their new-found love of the artificial. This adoration extended from streets as abstract and adorable things separately to the houses of the streets, and even, with a characteristically delicious thrill of wickedness, to the women of the streets, and, with the remorseless logic of the period, to the patchouli, the rouge and the peroxide of hydrogen which are among the media of the craft of that ancient sisterhood. In short, it was a characteristic of the decadence not to sing the bloom of Nature but the bloom of cosmetics, and, likewise, town was adored for its artificial rather than its natural characteristics.

This new sophistication of the artistic temperament was again no sudden thing; it was linked by many correspondences with the urbane spirit of all times, although it favoured such remote forbears as Catullus and Petronius rather than the nearer and more domesticated ancestors, Charles Lamb, Samuel Johnson and Charles Dickens. It was Whistler who taught the modern world how to appreciate the beauty and wizardry of cities. He taught them by pictures and he taught them by magical and unforgettable words: “And when the evening mist clothes the riverside with poetry, as with a veil, the poor buildings lose themselves in the dim sky, and the tall chimneys become campanili, and the warehouses are palaces in the night, and the whole city hangs in the heavens, and fairy-land is before us....” But Whistler’s revelation was not for the sake of the town, it was for the sake of art. It was Oscar Wilde, taking his cue from Whistler, who turned the idea of the beauty of art against natural beauty, into the artificial against the natural. He learnt from Whistler that trick of thought which placed Nature under an obligation to Art. Whistler’s whimsical sayings about “foolish” sunsets and “Nature catching up to Art” set Oscar Wilde’s nimble wit dancing down the corridors of paradox. “What art really reveals to us is Nature’s lack of design,” he says; “her curious crudities, her extraordinary monotony, her absolutely unfinished condition. Nature has good intentions, of course, but, as Aristotle once said, she cannot carry them out. When I look at a landscape I cannot help seeing all its defects. It is fortunate for us, however, that Nature is so imperfect, as otherwise we should have had no art at all. Art is our spirited protest, our gallant attempt to teach Nature her proper place.... All bad art comes from returning to Life and Nature, and elevating them into ideals. Life and Nature may sometimes be used as part of Art’s rough material, but before they are of any real service to Art they must be translated into artistic conventions.... Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life. This results not merely from Life’s imitative instinct but from the fact that the self-conscious aim of Life is to find expression, and that Art offers it certain beautiful forms through which it may realise that energy.” But Wilde was not alone in upholding such ideas: they were in the air of the time, and found many exponents in what became a conscious if tentative revolt against Nature. “For behold!” cried Max Beerbohm in, if not the ablest, one of the most convincing of his satires, “the Victorian era comes to its end and the day of _sancta simplicitas_ is quite ended. The old signs are here and the portents warn the seer of life that we are ripe for a new epoch of artifice. Are not men rattling the dice-box and ladies dipping their fingers in the rouge-pot?” And history was induced to pay tribute to the mood by Richard Le Gallienne, who reminded his age that the bravest of men had worn corsets.

Romance--or, at least, romance in its old obvious sense of wonder attuned to awe--was not, then, the final essence of this new interest in town life; although the older romance had also its exponents during the _fin de siècle_ renaissance. The _London Voluntaries_ of William Ernest Henley set an older and more virile romanticism to a new music, and in no poem was his vigorous music more vigorous or more inspired than in the lines beginning “Down through the ancient Strand,” which close with a pæan of ardent appreciation, if without quite achieving real ecstasy:

“For earth and sky and air,
Are golden everywhere,
And golden with a gold so suave and fine
The looking on it lifts the heart like wine.
Trafalgar Square
(The fountains volleying golden glaze)
Gleams like an angel market. High aloft
Over his couchant Lions in a haze
Shimmering and bland and soft,
A dust of chrysoprase,
Our Sailor takes the golden gaze
Of the saluting sun, and flames superb
As once he flamed it on his ocean round.
The dingy dreariness of the picture-place,
Turned very nearly bright,
Takes on a luminous transciency of grace,
And shows no more a scandal to the ground.
The very blind man pottering on the kerb,
Among the posies and the ostrich feathers
And the rude voices touched with all the weathers
Of the long, varying year,
Shares in the universal alms of light,
The windows, with their fleeting, flickering fires,
The height and spread of frontage shining sheer,
The quiring signs, the rejoicing roofs and spires--
’Tis El Dorado--El Dorado plain,
The Golden City! And when a girl goes by,
Look! as she turns her glancing head,
A call of gold is floated from her ear!
Golden, all golden! In a golden glory,
Long lapsing down a golden coasted sky,
The day not dies but seems
Dispersed in wafts and drifts of gold, and shed
Upon a past of golden song and story
And memories of gold and golden dreams.”

But Henley was not blind to the seamy side of London life, to the grey and bitter tragedy of a great city, as he proved on more than one occasion, and, especially, in the poem beginning “Out of the poisonous East.” Among the notable poets who sang of the romance of London after Henley came Laurence Binyon, with his _London Visions_, which were inspired by a quieter and more reflective muse, but voicing none the less the peculiar qualities of the London enthusiasm of the time:

“Hazily blue the air, heavy with dews
The wind; and before me the cries and the crowd,
And the sleepless murmur of wheels; not loud,
For a magical softness all imbrues.
The softness estranges my sense: I see and I hear,
But know ’tis a vision intangible, shapes that seem.
All is unreal; the sound of the falling of feet,
Coming figures, and far-off hum of the street;
A dream, the gliding hurry, the endless lights,
Houses and sky, a dream, a dream!”

The newer and more peculiar sense of London was less general in its expression. It sprang more out of the intimacies of life, and appealed less to well-explored emotions of wonder and mystery than to more unique poetic moods of fewer but by no means rare individuals. It was more precisely a striving after reality through the medium of temperament. This intimate romanticism of the new urbanity tended always towards the artificial. Perhaps it was almost too real to be romantic, as it was too romantic to be real. It was less the artistic expression of a phase of life than the expression of a phase of art. It was really the art of posing, using the term intellectually to indicate what was certainly a state of mind rather than a conceit, for there is no reason why a pose need be other than sincere. The artificiality of the period which thus expressed itself by means of the personal pose was essentially a form of dandyism, not the dandyism which might or could express itself merely in clothing, but that dandyism of the temperament which found a true philosopher in Barbey D’Aurevilly and, perhaps, a truer in Charles Baudelaire. The dandyism of Baudelaire only expressed itself incidentally in the clothing of the body. It strove tragically enough to achieve soul-sufficiency, not by tasting, as the old mystics did, all the stars and all the heavens in a crust of bread, but by experiencing purgatory in every sensation. He and his followers were dandies of the spirit; but acute consciousness of sin bade them resist not evil, in contradistinction to the older mystics who became dandies of the spirit because they resisted evil. The desire of Baudelaire, as of all those who are in any way akin to him, was to discover in life that ecstasy which is eternity.

Dandyism may, and generally does, express itself in clothes; it did in the Eighteen Nineties express itself in the apparel of many a self-conscious “masher.” But, whether it expresses itself in the clothing of the body or in the clothing of the mind, it is generally the outcome of similar causes. The chief of these, as Barbey D’Aurevilly saw, is boredom. Dandyism is thus a protest against the lassitude of soul which follows lapse of interest in the life of the hour. “Like those philosophers,” says D’Aurevilly, “who raised up an obligation superior to the law, so the dandies of their own authority make rules that shall dominate the most aristocratic, the most conservative sets, and with the help of wit, which is an acid, and of grace, which is a dissolvent, they manage to ensure the acceptance of their changeable rules, though these are in fact nothing but the outcome of their own audacious personalities. Such a result is curious, and flows from the nature of things. In vain does society refuse to bend, in vain do aristocracies admit only received opinions; one day Caprice arises and makes its way through those seemingly impenetrable grades, which were really undermined by boredom.” The revolt against Nature in England was in reality a revolt against the ennui of conventions which in operation acted as checks upon the free movements of personalities and ideas. D’Aurevilly has observed that dandyism in recent times was an English product, but also that it was introduced into this country originally by the gallants of the Restoration who had lived in France during the time England was under the heel of the Puritan: it was, in fact, the Pagan’s reply to Puritanism. Dandyism has always been in the nature of such a reply. But it is interesting to note that the new romanticism which found expression in the decadence was also derived from France, as was also its immediate ancestor, that romantic movement to which D’Aurevilly belonged.

Dandyism of the intellect was as much a characteristic of Théophile Gautier, Charles Baudelaire and Barbey D’Aurevilly as it was of Whistler, Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley, and it is worth noting that these three English-speaking artists were dandies also in the sartorial sense. But the resemblance to the innate dandyism of D’Aurevilly is even more marked when we remember his theory that dandyism always produced the unexpected--“that which could not logically be anticipated by those accustomed to the yoke of rules.” Unexpectedness was the secret of half the originality of the Eighteen Nineties; it was the salt of its philosophy, and the charm of its most characteristic art. “To expect the unexpected shows a thoroughly modern intellect,” said Oscar Wilde in his _Phrases and Philosophies for the Use of the Young_, a little work which is a veritable philosophy of dandyism. Literature in the Nineties ran to epigram, that poseur of syntax, and to paradox, that dandified juggler of ideas. Habits played blind man’s buff with convention; and so determined was the fashion of the hour to be “out of fashion” that, with those who were _dans le mouvement_ heterodoxy took the sting out of its own tail by becoming a form of orthodoxy. So remarkable was this spread of intellectual vanity that it was quite possible to have at one and the same time such variations as Oscar Wilde and Aubrey Beardsley surprising by their neo-paganism and its glorification of the artificial; Max Beerbohm and G. S. Street surprising by their satires of the former and, above all, by their very conservatism in an age of revolt; and, at the other extreme, such a complete and versatile revolutionary surprise packet of vanity as Bernard Shaw, who added to the general astonishment by insisting upon the Puritanical basis of his own theory of life. Equally surprising and unexpected to all but the most patient observers of intellectual revolutions, was the completion of the somersault of ideas at the very dawn of the twentieth century, when intellectual consciousness landed on its feet, as it were, becoming wildly English and frankly Christian in the genius of G. K. Chesterton.

Whilst the essential dandyism of the decade lasted it needed an urban background. Town was its natural element, pastoral dandyism being as yet unborn, though pastoral romance was as old as the hills. The very idyll of love literally assumed a new complexion. It was not fashionable for poets to sing of shepherd who told

“his tale
Under the hawthorn in the dale.”

It was the fashion to sing, as Arthur Symons did, of

“The chance romances of the streets,
The Juliet of a night”;

and poets, far from protesting overmuch of eternal fidelity, unblushingly confessed their lack of amorous concentration:

“I too have sought on many a breast
The ecstasy of love’s unrest,
I too have had my dreams and met
(Ah me!) how many a Juliet.”

Such poems are in many instances artificial to the extent that they are obviously the result of deliberately cultivated moods; they and their kind are the green carnations of song; and they are unnatural only to the extent that they represent a peculiarly civilised, as distinct from a peculiarly barbarian, form of life. These differences reveal themselves more clearly in Arthur Symons’ defence of his own early poems, which a reviewer had called “unwholesome” because, he said, they had “a faint smell of patchouli about them.” The name of that scent was used more or less symbolically, and the poet accepts it as such and sums up an eloquent defence of his position as follows:--

“Patchouli! Well, why not Patchouli? Is there any ‘reason in nature’ why we should write exclusively about the natural blush, if the delicately acquired blush of rouge has any attraction for us? Both exist; both, I think, are charming in their way; and the latter as a subject has, at all events, more novelty. If you prefer your ‘new mown hay’ in the hayfield, and I, it may be, in a scent bottle, why may not my individual caprice be allowed to find expression as well as yours? Probably I enjoy the hayfield as much as you do, but I enjoy quite other scents and sensations just as well and I take the former for granted and write my poem, for a change, about the latter. There is no necessary difference in artistic value between a good poem about a flower in the hedge, and a good poem about the scent in a sachet. I am always charmed to read beautiful poems about nature in the country. Only, personally, I prefer town to country; and in the town we have to find for ourselves, as best we may, the _décor_ which is the town equivalent of the great natural _décor_ of fields and hills. Here it is that artificiality comes in; and if anyone sees no beauty in the effects of artificial light in all the variable, most human, and yet most factitious town landscape, I can only pity him, and go on my own way.”

The above passage does something more than defend with sound logic the artificial attitude of the decadence: it throws a very useful light upon the whole of that phase of the art and life of the period. Arthur Symons in his own personality substantiates Barbey D’Aurevilly’s theory that the dandy is the product of boredom; Symons having been nurtured in Nonconformity represents literally a Pagan revolt against Puritanism. His use of such words as “novelty,” “change” and “caprice” further reveal the existence of a temperament which, having grown restive under the constraints of custom and recognised procedure, seeks reality in the conscious exploitation of mood and whim. It was only the very young and the very limited in vision who imagined that novelty, caprice and change, associated with sensation, held in themselves any satisfying food for the soul; and, if they did imagine such a thing, disillusion was ever waiting for the chance to offer them her cold companionship. As for the whim of artificiality, that child of decadent inquisitiveness, neither in life nor in art was it other than limited and exotic. Even the hints of the existence of perversions like homosexuality were more or less exaggerated: they would be more appropriate to the London of to-day than to the London immediately preceding the trial of Oscar Wilde.

Aubrey Beardsley was the supreme example of the revolt against Nature, but it is probable that even his revolt was more artistic than actual. In his art he realised Oscar Wilde’s dictum that “The first duty in life is to be as artificial as possible.” His pictures are at the antipodes of naturalism, and his unfinished romance, _Under the Hill_, is a mosaic of artificiality. Life is never left to its own unaided devices for a moment in this strange work, which seems at times, by the very heaped-up deliberation of its artifice, to satirise all the weaknesses of the decadence, by pressing them to their logical conclusion in the negation of all spontaneous desire save desire for the gratification of perverse sensations. It creates life out of cosmetics and aberrations; and Nature never appears except in the form of an abnormality. Could anything more artificial be imagined, outside of a picture by Beardsley, than this description of the toilet of Venus? “Before a toilet that shone like the altar of Notre Dame des Victoires, Venus was seated in a little dressing-gown of black and heliotrope. The coiffeur Cosmé was caring for her scented chevelure, and with tiny silver tongs, warm from the caresses of the flame, made delicious intelligent curls that fell as lightly as a breath about her forehead, and over her eyebrows, and clustered like tendrils about her neck. Her three favourite girls, Papplarde, Blanchemains and Loreyne, waited immediately upon her with perfume and powder in delicate flaçons and frail cassolettes, and held in porcelain jars the ravishing paints prepared by Châteline for those cheeks and lips that had grown a little pale with anguish of exile. Her three favourite boys, Claude, Clair and Sarrasine, stood amorously about with salver, fan and napkin. Millarmant held a slight tray of slippers, Minette some tender gloves, La Popelinière, mistress of the robes, was ready with a frock of yellow and yellow. La Zambinella bore the jewels, Florizel some flowers, Amadour a box of various pins, and Vadius a box of sweets. Her doves, ever in attendance, walked about the room that was panelled with gallant paintings of Jean Baptiste Dorat, and some dwarfs and doubtful creatures sat here and there, lolling out their tongues, pinching each other, and behaving oddly enough.”

In spite of all this artificiality, the revolt against Nature was not organised, but it was very real and very self-conscious for all that. An artificial and half-hearted attempt was made to revive the literary tavern, and literary discussions were actually heard once again in so unpromising a quarter as Fleet Street, as they once had been heard in the days of Samuel Johnson. The Rhymers’ Club foregathered at the Cheshire Cheese, and members read their poems to one another and discussed the great business of poetry and life. This revival of the town did not last long; a new charmer appeared upon the scene, and even poets fell before the seductions of suburban life. They became victims of our national love of compromise, and the exodus began. “Who knows but that Artifice is in truth at our gates and that soon she may pass through our streets?” asked Max Beerbohm, in 1894. The new queen was more than at our gates: she had entered the city; but she was never really enthroned. On the eve of her accession fear struck the hearts of _les jeunes ecrivains_; fear, or disillusion, or the birth-pangs of middle age, and Queen Artifice was denied by her whilom courtiers from villa retreats without the city walls. The only artifice which actually survived was that which, like the romance in Kipling’s poem, was already “printed and bound in little books.” The chance romances of the streets were abandoned for the reputedly more certain realities of home life. Bohemians cut their locks, shed their soft collars and fell back upon Suburbia. No more songs about Nora of the Pavement, no more rhapsodies about the glamour of the footlights, no more rhetoric about passionate and scarlet lives; even dandyism of thought and word disappeared; for, once you live in a suburb, there is nothing left but to become ordinary.

The decadence suffered early from fatty degeneration of its naughtiness and found sanctuary in the suburbs. Even Max Beerbohm, during his “first year at Oxford,” saw it coming, as he thought of “the lurid verses written by young men who, in real life, know no haunt more lurid than a literary public-house.”