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It is not hard to see how, in the effort to give Mr. Brummell his due place in history, Monsieur D'Aurevilly came to grief. It is but strange that he should have fallen into a rather obvious trap. Surely he should have perceived that, so long as Civilisation compels her children to wear clothes, the thoughtless multitude will never acknowledge dandyism to be an art.
She dressed in the very extreme and front of fashion the squire himself quite plainly, without the least pretence of dandyism. Hateful as the village folk thought her hauteur and open contempt for them, they said she was more the lady than the squire was the gentleman. The squire's time, when at home, like everything else, was peddled away.
He was an elderly man, dressed almost more than well, for there was about him a slight affectation of dandyism; and though he had for the moment been abashed, there was about him also a slight swagger.
His twenty years of Colonial life, divesting him of the dandyism in which he had been bred, had left him the essential neatness of the horseman, and given him a queer and rather blighting eye over what he called "the silly haw-haw" of some Englishmen, the "flapping cockatoory" of some English-women Holly had none of that and Holly was his model.
The influence of these last over the others was quite apparent. They were evidently chiefs bishops or deacons "tenths" or "seventies." It was singular enough to see dandies among them; and yet, however ludicrous the exhibition, dandyism was there displayed! More than one "swell" strutted through the crowd in patent-leather boots, Parisian silk hat, and coat of shining broad-cloth!
In spite of envy and conspiracies, Balzac's reputation was now established; he had become one of those writers who are widely discussed and whose sayings and doings are a current topic of conversation. At the same time, he was the prey of the low-class journals, which attacked him maliciously. At this period, Balzac was passing through a second attack of dandyism.
Fashion, by which what is really fantastic becomes for a moment universal, and dandyism, which, in its own way, is an attempt to assert the absolute modernity of beauty, had, of course, their fascination for him.
But if a fish is to be approximately understood, this physiological dandyism must be overcome. The earnest student of fish morality will, spiritually speaking, chop off his legs.
This figure was in every respect the opposite of my last visitor. Although framed perfectly upon the late Parisian school of dandyism, his, however, was the "ecole militaire."
Among the men whom I saw occasionally at the little club in Mortimer Street, and nowhere else, was one who drew my attention before I had learnt his name or knew anything about him. Of middle age, in the fullness of health and vigour, but slenderly built; his face rather shrewd than intellectual, interesting rather than pleasing; always dressed as the season's mode dictated, but without dandyism; assuredly he belonged to the money-spending, and probably to the money-getting, world. At first sight of him I remember resenting his cap-
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