Ellen Moers

The Dandy

When such solid values as wealth and birth are upset, ephemera such as style and pose are called upon to justify the stratification of society.

Simple foppery (or affectation in male costume) is as old as time: some wags have traced it to the Old Testament. But dandyism as a social, even political phenomenon, with repercussions in the world of ideas, was the invention of the Regency, when aristocracy and monarchy were more widely despised (hence more nastily exclusive) than ever before or since in English history. What the utilitarian middle class most hated in the nobility was what the court most worshipped in the dandy—a creature perfect in externals and careless of anything below the surface, a man dedicated solely to his own perfection through a ritual of taste. The epitome of selfish irresponsibility, he was ideally free of all human commitments that conflict with taste: passions, moralities, ambitions, politics or occupations. The first great modern war was moving toward climax; those who stayed at home created a supernumerary supreme being: a Hero so evidently at the centre of the stage that he need do nothing to prove his heroism—need never, in fact, do anything at all.

Throughout the nineteenth century the rising majority called for equality, responsibility, energy; the dandy stood for superiority, irresponsibility, inactivity. Inexcusably, in all his ghostly elegance, he haunted the Victorian imagination. Carlyle could deride him as a thing made by a tailor; the Victorians could denounce him as Not-a-Gentleman; but the novelists could not avoid the dandy. Though it might be necessary for a man to have a function, a function was obviously not in itself a man. Finding it impossible to imagine either heroism without dandyism or a truly heroic dandy, Thackeray invented the Novel-without-a-Hero. And Dickens, disappointed in his success, expressed the tragedy of failure in the form of the dandy—the man who had failed to find a function, but was important nonetheless by the shape of his existence.

Distressingly personal in England, the dandy ideal in France could become an abstraction, a refinement of intellectual rebellion. Because the dandy was foreign, the French could idealize him for what he was not: not middle-class and drab, not philistine and stupid, not buried in the tedious, undistinguished existence of those who merely lived out their time in the bourgeois century. The ambiguous symbol of the dandy brought together ideas and attitudes of the most unlikely contemporaries in the two countries.