BEAU BRUMMELL AND CLOTHES
‘A person, my dear, who will probably come and speak to us; and if he enters into conversation, be careful to give him a favourable impression of you, for,’ and she sunk her voice to a whisper, ‘he is the celebrated Mr. Brummell.’—‘Life of Beau Brummell,’ Captain Jesse.
Those who care to make the melancholy pilgrimage may see, in the Protestant Cemetery at Caen, the tomb of George Bryan Brummell. He died, at the age of sixty-two, in 1840.
It is indeed a melancholy pilgrimage to view the tomb of that once resplendent figure, to think, before the hideous grave, of the witty, clever, foolish procession from Eton to Oriel College, Oxford; from thence to a captaincy in the 10th Hussars, from No. 4 Chesterfield Street to No. 13 Chapel Street, Park Lane; from Chapel Street a flight to Calais; from Calais to Paris; and then, at last, to Caen, and the bitter, bitter end, mumbling and mad, to die in the Bon Sauveur.
Place him beside the man who once pretended to be his friend, the man of whom Thackeray spoke so truly: ‘But a bow and a grin. I try and take him to pieces, and find silk stockings, padding, stays, a coat with frogs and a fur coat, a star and a blue ribbon, a pocket handkerchief prodigiously scented, one of Truefitt’s best nutty-brown wigs reeking with oil, a set of teeth, and a huge black stock, under-waistcoats, more under-waistcoats, and then nothing.’
Nothing! Thackeray is right; absolutely nothing remains of this King George of ours but a sale list of his wardrobe, a wardrobe which fetched £15,000 second-hand—a wardrobe that had been a man. He invented a shoe-buckle 1 inch long and 5 inches broad. He wore a pink silk coat with white cuffs. He had 5,000 steel beads on his hat. He was a coward, a good-natured, contemptible voluptuary. Beside him, in our eyes, walks for a time the elegant figure of Beau Brummell. I have said that Brummell was the inventor of modern dress: it is true. He was the Beau who raised the level of dress from the slovenly, dirty linen, the greasy hair, the filthy neckcloth, the crumbled collar, to a position, ever since held by Englishmen, of quiet, unobtrusive cleanliness, decent linen, an abhorrence of striking forms of dress.
He made clean linen and washing daily a part of English life.
See him seated before his dressing-glass, a mahogany-framed sliding cheval glass with brass arms on either sides for candles. By his side is George IV., recovering from his drunken bout of last night. The Beau’s glass reflects his clean-complexioned face, his grey eyes, his light brown hair, and sandy whiskers. A servant produces a shirt with a 12-inch collar fixed to it, assists the Beau into it, arranges it, and stands aside. The collar nearly hides the Beau’s face. Now, with his hand protected with a discarded shirt, he folds his collar down to the required height. Now he takes his white stock and folds it carefully round the collar; the stock is a foot high and slightly starched. A supreme moment of artistic decision, and the stock and collar take their perfect creases. In an hour or so he will be ready to partake of a light meal with the royal gentleman. He will stand up and survey himself in his morning dress, his regular, quiet suit. A blue coat, light breeches fitting the leg well, a light waistcoat over a waistcoat of some other colour, never a startling contrast, Hessian boots, or top-boots and buckskins. There was nothing very peculiar about his clothes except, as Lord Byron said, ‘an exquisite propriety.’ His evening dress was a blue coat, white waistcoat, black trousers buttoned at the ankle—these were of his own invention, and one may say it was the wearing of them that made trousers more popular than knee-breeches—striped silk stockings, and a white stock.
He was a man of perfect taste—of fastidious taste. On his tables lay books of all kinds in fine covers. Who would suspect it? but the Prince is leaning an arm on a copy of Ellis’s ‘Early English Metrical Romances.’ The Beau is a rhymer, an elegant verse-maker. Here we see the paper-presser of Napoleon—I am flitting for the moment over some years, and see him in his room in Calais—here we notice his passion for buhl, his Sèvres china painted with Court beauties.
In his house in Chapel Street he saw daily portraits of Nelson and Pitt and George III. upon his walls. This is no Beau as we understand the term, for we make it a word of contempt, a nickname for a feeble fellow in magnificent garments. Rather this is the room of an educated gentleman of ‘exquisite propriety.’
He played high, as did most gentlemen; he was superstitious, as are many of the best of men. That lucky sixpence with the hole in it that you gave to a cabman, Beau Brummell, was that loss the commencement of your downward career?
There are hundreds of anecdotes of Brummell which, despite those of the ‘George, ring the bell’ character, and those told of his heavy gaming, are more valuable as showing his wit, his cleanliness, his distaste of display—in fact, his ‘exquisite propriety.’
A Beau is hardly a possible figure to-day; we have so few personalities, and those we have are chiefly concerned with trade—men who uphold trusts, men who fight trusts, men who speak for trade in the House of Commons. We have not the same large vulgarities as our grandfathers, nor have we the same wholesome refinement; in killing the evil—the great gambler, the great men of the turf, the great prize-fighters, the heavy wine-drinkers—we have killed, also, the good, the classic, well-spoken civil gentleman. Our manners have suffered at the expense of our morals.
Fifty or sixty years ago the world was full of great men, saying, writing, thinking, great things. To-day—perhaps it is too early to speak of to-day. Personalities are so little marked by their clothes, by any stamp of individuality, that the caricaturist, or even the minute and truthful artist, be he painter or writer, has a difficult task before him when he sets out to point at the men of these our times.
George Brummell came into the world on June 7, 1778. He was a year or so late for the Macaroni style of dress, many years behind the Fribbles, after the Smarts, and must have seen the rise and fall of the Zebras when he was thirteen. During his life he saw the old-fashioned full frock-coat, bagwig, solitaire, and ruffles die away; he saw the decline and fall of knee-breeches for common wear, and the pantaloons invented by himself take their place. From these pantaloons reaching to the ankle came the trousers, as fashionable garments, open over the instep at first, and joined by loops and buttons, then strapped under the boot, and after that in every manner of cut to the present style. He saw the three-cornered hat vanish from the hat-boxes of the polite world, and he saw fine-coloured clothes give way to blue coats with brass buttons or coats of solemn black.
It may be said that England went into mourning over the French Revolution, and has not yet recovered. Beau Brummell, on his way to Eton, saw a gay-coloured crowd of powdered and patched people, saw claret-coloured coats covered with embroidery, gold-laced hats, twinkling shoe-buckles. On his last walks in Caen, no doubt, he dreamed of London as a place of gay colours instead of the drab place it was beginning to be.
To-day there is no more monotonous sight than the pavements of Piccadilly crowded with people in dingy, sad clothes, with silk tubes on their heads, their black and gray suits being splashed by the mud from black hansoms, or by the scatterings of motor-cars driven by aristocratic-looking mechanics, in which mechanical-looking aristocrats lounge, darkly clad. Here and there some woman’s dress enlivens the monotony; here a red pillar-box shines in the sun; there, again, we bless the Post-Office for their red mail-carts, and perhaps we are strengthened to bear the gloom by the sight of a blue or red bus.
But our hearts are not in tune with the picture; we feel the lack of colour, of romance, of everything but money, in the street. Suddenly a magnificent policeman stops the traffic; there is a sound of jingling harness, of horses’ hoofs beating in unison. There flashes upon us an escort of Life Guards sparkling in the sun, flashing specks of light from swords, breastplates, helmets. The little forest of waving plumes, the raising of hats, the polite murmuring of cheers, warms us. We feel young, our hearts beat; we feel more healthy, more alive, for this gleam of colour.
Then an open carriage passes us swiftly as we stand with bared heads. There is a momentary sight of a man in uniform—a man with a wonderful face, clever, dignified, kind. And we say, with a catch in our voices:
‘The King—God bless him!’
THE END
BILLING AND SONS, LTD., PRINTERS, GUILDFORD, ENGLAND
Transcriber's Note
Hyphenation has been made consistent. Minor errors in punctuation have been corrected.
The following items were noted by the transcriber:
Page [361]—the text reads, "Another thing the women did was to cut from their bodices all the little strips but the in the middle of the back, ..." which seems to be missing the word 'one' between 'the' and 'in'. It has been added in this etext.
Page [442]—the word CUROSY may be an error for CURSORY, or it may be the pen-name of the quoted writer. However, as the transcriber was unable to confirm either way, it has been preserved as printed.
Archaic spelling is preserved as printed. Variable spelling has been made consistent where there was a prevalence of one form over the other, and typographic errors have been repaired, as follows:
Page [38] (plate facing)—whimple amended to wimple—"She has a wimple in her hands which she may wind about her head."
Page [52] (plate facing)—whimple amended to wimple—"There is a chin-band to be seen passing under the wimple; ..."
Page [54]—Fontevfaud amended to Fontevraud—"The effigy of the Queen at Fontevraud shows her dress ..."
Page [73]—wode amended to woad—"... by staining themselves blue with woad and yellow with ochre, ..."
Page [74] (plate facing)—whimple amended to wimple—"... a plain cloak, a plain gown, and a wimple over the head."
Page [82]—kaleidscope amended to kaleidoscope—"... like the symmetrical accidents of the kaleidoscope, ..."
Page [87]—head-hankerchief amended to head-handkerchief—"... as was the gown and head- handkerchief of his wife."
Page [92]—repeated 'new' deleted—"... for, although men followed the new mode, ladies adhered to their earlier fashions."
Page [94]—tieing amended to tying—"Every quaint thought and invention for tying up this liripipe was used: ..."
Page [96]—tow amended to two—"Then there were two distinct forms of cape: ..."
Page [123]—Ploughman amended to Plowman—"... William Langland, or Piers the Plowman."
Page [142]—Louttrell amended to Loutrell—"... together with the artist of the Loutrell Psalter, ..."
Page [142]—repeated 'British' removed—"... are cheap to obtain and the British Museum is free to all."
Page [154]—waistcoast amended to waistcoat—"Over his tunic he wears a quilted waistcoat, ..."
Page [189]—excresences amended to excrescences—"... surmounted by minarets, towers, horns, excrescences of every shape ..."
Page [247]—Katharine amended to Katherine—"Married, 1509, Katherine of Aragon; ..." and "... 1540, Katherine Howard; ..."
Page [259]—martin amended to marten—"... to wear marten or velvet trimming you must be worth over two hundred marks a year."
Page [291]—anp amended to and (typesetting error)—"How, they and we ask, are breeches, ..."
Page [296]—Nuserie amended to Nurserie—"‘The Wits Nurserie.’"
Page [305]—underproper amended to underpropper—"First, the lady put on her underpropper of wire ..." and "... wore such a ruff as required an underpropper, ..."
Page [313]—choses amended to chooses—"... and from these the Queen chooses one."
Page [334]—fardingle amended to fardingale—"... and twirl her round until the Catherine- wheel fardingale is a blurred circle, ..."
Page [337]—Castille amended to Castile—"On another day comes the news that the Constable of Castile ..."
Page [417]—Macaronies amended to Macaronis—"... you may tell yourself here is one of the new Macaronis, ..."
The frontispiece illustration has been moved to follow the title page. Other illustrations have been moved where necessary so that they are not in the middle of a paragraph.