Perinde ac cadaver [619988]

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Perinde ac cadaver!
The Philosophy of Dandyism

Christopher Fear

To my brothers,
…“So dandy!”

~

We are all familiar with the figure of the dandy: H e is, we think, a fashion-
concerned, preening, foppish narcissist; outwardly attractive, but inwardly hollow; all
style, no substance. His soul is vacant.
Actually this is a monstrous confusion. In terms of his appearance we commonly
fail to distinguish the dandy, who appeared in the early nineteenth century, from the
seventeenth-century fop, and from the eighteenth-ce ntury ‘Macaroni.’ And in terms of
character we conflate him with the ‘Romantic,’ agai nst whom the dandy was actually a
reaction. And on both counts we fail to distinguish the true dandy from his own
ostensible revival later in the century by extraver t self-publicists like Oscar Wilde. (I’ll
explain later why Wilde ruined dandyism.)
Dandyism proper arose, it seems, in the years follo wing the Napoleonic Wars and
the Congress of Vienna (1815), and survived until t he death of Beau Brummell, ‘King of
the Dandies,’ in 1840. Dandyism was a response to a prevailing grubby state of fashion
that was rooted in the values of Romanticism. Accor ding to the trendy look of the time,
the “fashionable were obliged to present themselves , at first sight, as ill and unhappy;

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they had to possess something negligent about the p erson, long nails, a partial beard, not
shaved, but allowed to grow a little, neglectfully, during their preoccupation with despair;
locks of straggling hair; a profound gaze, sublime, errant and fatal.” 1 Against this shoddy
state of affairs, the principles of the dandy were a particularity of dress and a reassertion
of self-control, with the intention of achieving ab solute refinement outwardly and
inwardly. This reaction against carelessness is how Beau Brummell’s great invention of
the starched neck-cloth was achieved.
Contrary to the popular reputation Brummell and the dandies now suffer, their
intervention in men’s fashion was against foppish over-dressing and gaudiness, and in
favour of simplicity and neatness. Dandies eschewed arbitrary ornamentation as bad
taste, and favoured instead rightness of cut and to tal perfection of fit. So flawless was the
fit of Brummell’s own coat that, according to Byron , “it seemed as if his body was
thinking.” (It is said that Byron, when asked, said that he would rather be Brummell than
Napoleon.)
But in 1840 Brummell died. He was the ‘last of the beaus,’ and with him his
imitators disappeared. The conventional ‘dandy’ fig ure vanished from the streets and
salons of Europe; he lived on only in the nostalgia of those who once knew ‘a true
dandy’, or at least claimed once to have met a true dandy. And it was at precisely this
time, from the 1840s and into the 1860s, that analy sis of dandyism – speculations on its
inner ‘principles’ – began to appear. One early con tributor was François-René de
Chateaubriand. “Doubtless,” admitted Chateaubriand, “all this has changed at the very
moment I set out to describe it.” 2 It seems that the Owl of Minerva, as Hegel famousl y
said, is always so last season. But it is this body of literature that interests us here, because
that is where memoir accounts of dandyism become my thology, and then something
approaching ‘a philosophy.’ I’ll return to its deta ils in a moment.
Towards the end of the 1860s writers lost interest in the now-obscure social
phenomenon of dandyism. It was, perhaps, difficult to say anything new about dandies.
But dandyism had a strange afterlife, and I think t he man particularly responsible for this
was convicted ‘sodomite,’ Oscar Wilde. I like the m an, and I like his works for the stage
very much. But he did not, I think, understand dand yism. He conflated it with foppery
and soiled it with the kind of sickly Romanticism t hat characterises his early poems. He
pumped it full of his own flabby brand of queer fem ininity. And with his paradoxical
ontological proposition – that in matters of grave importance style, not sincerity, is the

1 Chateaubriand, Memoirs, 1848
2 Memoirs from beyond the grave, 1848

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vital thing – Wilde gave plenty of credence to the view of dandyism as a philosophy of
insincerity, of hollowness, a philosophy of surface.
Now, there is no reason why philosophy should be in herently hostile to
superficiality: Shallowness and surface are bad onl y if depth is what is more highly valued;
if concern for surfaces is inferior to concern for the guts, insides, and souls of things – if,
in other words, in matters of grave importance, sincerity and not style is the vital thing. But
dandyism before Wilde was never about this. The who le point for Wilde was to make a
name for himself, and part of his personal show was to pose as a throwback to the
beginning of the century. Even though the only thin g he successfully embodied (in
himself at any rate) was pastiche, the act worked; he quickly became famous, and he has
remained so ever since. I suspect our present-day M an in the Street is still, in this regard,
in the audience of Wilde, and accordingly thinks of the dandy as a kind of hyper-old-
fashioned homosexual.
This misunderstanding has even entered academia. La st night, over a glass of
cheap brandy, I read a trashy little article by Eli sa Glick called ‘The Dialectics of
Dandyism’ ( Cultural Critique, 2001). Glick argues that the dandy is a complex fo rm of gay
male split subjectivity, “paradigmatic of a new for m of consciousness that capitalist social
relations engender.” He is, she raves, a “split, co ntradictory subjectivity that is
constructed around the opposition between public an d private, outside and inside.” 3

The reworked notion of dandyism as a protest agains t modern industrial
capitalism [Glick continues] has become the foundat ion for contemporary
gay/lesbian studies’ “take” on the aristocratic tur n-of-the-century gay male
stereotype, as well as the foundation of queer theo ry’s promotion of a
contemporary “politics of style.” …the dandy stradd les the contradictions of
capitalism. 4

My view is that this is horse-shit, and the reason is that the author, like the Man
in the Street, has associated dandyism with Oscar W ilde, who did not himself understand
it. Glick’s whole ‘study,’ if that is what it can b e called, is based on The Picture of Dorian
Gray… (there’s also a lot of Marx, Marcuse, Lukacs, Baudrillard, Bourdieu, and a
commensurately heavy layer of trendy continental ps eudo-technical, in-crowd marker
terms like ‘reification,’ ‘transcendence,’ ‘alienat ion,’ etc.) …and although Dorian Gray is

3 Elisa Glick, 2001, p. 132
4 Elisa Glick, 2001, p. 131

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about a lot of great things, it is not about dandyi sm. Glick even acknowledges, in one
footnote, that…

Of course, the dandy was not always… thought to be gay. For Beau Brummell and
the Regency dandies of the early nineteenth century , there was not… [an] association
of effeminate dandyism and same-sex desire. But… af ter Wilde’s trial in 1895, the
effeminate dandy was linked to the homosexual in th e public imagination. My study
of dandyism [she goes on] begins at this moment, af ter which it became impossible
not to think of the dandy as gay.

I think Glick is wrong. She is wrong because by 189 5 ‘real-life’ dandyism had
been dead for more than half a century; and if we w ant to know about the philosophy of
dandyism we have to look past Wilde and his contriv ed novel, and return to the 1840s,
50s and 60s. The crowning glory of the mid-nineteen th-century ‘philosophy of dandyism’
genre is, to my mind, the four or five pages of Cha rles Baudelaire’s 1863 essay The Painter
of Modern Life which together comprise a kind of mini-essay: ‘The Dandy’ has become
one of the core texts in the canon. 5 Baudelaire took dandyism very seriously, both in h is
writings and in his own life – though he never brok e the unwritten rule of the genre: One
writes about dandy ism , and not about oneself as a dandy .
According to Baudelaire, dandyism is an ‘ancient pr iesthood, which “appears
above all in periods of transition, when democracy is not yet all-powerful, and aristocracy
is only just beginning to totter and fall.” “Caesar , Catiline and Alcibiades,” he writes,
“provide us with dazzling examples.” This is a pant heon into which Oliver Wendell
Holmes, author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, had five years earlier (in 1858)
introduced Aristotle, Marc Antony, Petrarc, and the Duke of Wellington.
But if dandyism really is a “mysterious institution ,” a “weird kind” of religion that
“borders upon the spiritual and stoical,” as Baudel aire said, what are its inner doctrines?
What are these ‘rigorous’ but secret laws that Baud elaire, like the mythologizers of
dandyism before him, hinted at? Certainly he thinks there is an inner philosophy – a
doctrine, he suggests, of “elegance and originality .” It is our task here to get behind the
image of the dandy to the philosophical meaning of dandy ism, if there is one; to go from
the surface ‘look’ to the underlying ‘aesthetic’ – to conjure a hand to fit the glove.

5 ‘The Painter of Modern Life’ in Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, London: Phaidon,
and refer to pp. 26–31 (Section IX: ‘The Dandy’) of that publication unless otherwise stated.

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I think I share Baudelaire’s belief, or perhaps it’ s a suspicion, that there is a
hidden wisdom to dandyism, under the skin, and I think he’s right that it’s noticeably stoic.
But is dandyism philosophy ? And, if it is, is it good philosophy? Answering these two
questions is, in one sense, a strange task. Idealis m is a school of philosophy, an – ism , and
ideal-ists are people who ascribe to it. Socialism is an – ism, and social -ists are those who
ascribe to it. But dandies are, or were, men who al ready share certain patterns of
behaviour, and dandy- ism – the philosophy that is taken to lie ‘behind’ it – does not offer
itself in the same way. As happened in the mid-nine teenth-century, it has to be
extrapolated or created posthumously by the sympath etic philosopher – or, if times are
hard, by a Ph.D. student with a penchant for overdr essing and not enough to do in the
evenings.
There are, I think, three senses of philosophy we c an use. First, a ‘philosophy’ is a
liveable way of life; secondly it might denote a ‘w orld-view’; or it might, thirdly, refer to a
set of answers to some set of presupposed questions . The sense, the ‘philosophy of
philosophy,’ appropriate to dandyism, I think, is a version of all three, and it is something
like this: ‘A philosophy describes a relation betwe en a man and the world according to
which he might best live out his existence.’
Dandyism is clearly a liveable way of life, and the re are certain things that
characterise the dandy’s dealings with the world. A s well as his immaculate dress and
sense of taste, he tends to appear disinterested in the common man, in society and its
rules generally. He eschews work, he gets into terr ible gambling debts, he goes into exile
(usually in France), and he dies young and thin, le aving behind him crowds of illegitimate
children. Although there is disagreement over preci se details such as this, there is one
basic point of agreement, but it is perhaps exactly what we don’t expect: Dandyism is about
much more than just being well dressed. (Many concede, though, that maintaining public
standards of dress is one of their positive contrib utions to society.)
In the view of some contemporary advocates of dandy ism, the mid-nineteenth-
century French analysts did the dandy a great disse rvice by dissociating him from his
clothes, thus obscuring his essence. Being perfectl y dressed at all hours of the day has
always been the conditio sine qua non of dandyism, but this seems in all cases to have b een
given some ‘spiritual’ significance. And it can’t b e denied that being perfectly dressed all
the time would affect one’s spirit. Jerome K. Jerome observe d that “clothes have more
effect upon us than we imagine”; “clothes alter our very nature” he wrote; “the

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consciousness of being well dressed imparts a bliss fulness to the human heart that
religion is powerless to bestow.” 6
The contemporary memoirs of those who had known a t rue dandy did go further
than praising just his clothes. Most, usually women , remember him as achieving the
perfection of gentlemanliness, showing great sharpn ess of mind and wit, and exhibiting
in all things effortlessness. According to Bulwer-L ytton, the dandy would also “dance
well, fence well, and have an agreeable voice for a chamber.” 7 An anonymous contributor
to an 1861 edition of Chambers’s Journal wrote that dandies were “indeed peculiar in their
attire, but that was but a small part of their eleg ant peculiarities.” Their fraternity was
actually, he thought, about “the Science of Civilis ed Existence.”
Baudelaire too, of course, goes beyond clothes. The perfect dandy for him is not
interested in dress and material elegance for its o wn sake. These things are, he says, “no
more than symbols of his aristocratic superiority o f mind.” “These beings,” he continues,
“have no other calling but to cultivate the idea of beauty in their persons.” “It is,” he
adds, “a kind of cult of the self which can neverth eless survive the pursuit of a happiness
to be found in someone else – in a woman, for examp le.”
I think this notion of cultivating beauty in the se lf has to be put at the centre of
any account of the ‘philosophy of dandyism.’ Man ex ercises his will and creativity upon
all outward objects, but it is in his work upon him self, particularly upon his own spirit,
that he encounters his richest and most challenging raw material. But it is also what looks
to the lazy observer like the dandy’s self-obsessio n – his narcissism, his vanity. This is
because dandies operate with a focus on grace and b eauty, rather than on ‘the good’, or
on ‘kindness’; and they allow their apparent achiev ement in spirit to take affect and to
display its symptoms upon the body. They are not as hamed of it, just as the puritan is not
ashamed of his abstinence. The dandy is uninterested in other people, and in w hether or
not they imitate him. Other people are, rather, his audience, and to them he expresses the
beauty he has cultivated within himself through his constant display of aplomb.
The dandy idea of beauty is a classical one, and im portantly not a Romantic one.
It is achieved by conquering, rather than by lazily channelling, the emotional wildness
that still controls the Romantic. Thus, where the R omantic is movable, the dandy is still;
where the Romantic is impressionable, the dandy is impervious; where the Romantic is
nervous, the dandy is restful; and where the Romant ic is sensitive to his environment, the
dandy is cold, indifferent, and aloof.

6 ‘On Dress and Deportment,’ Idle Thoughts of an Idle Fellow, 1886
7 Bulwer-Lytton, “Pelham” – the words were originall y those of Etherege

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But the relationship between the dandy’s body and h is soul, between the outer
and the inner, flows in both directions, according to Baudelaire at least. For dandies, he
says, “the complicated material conditions” to whic h the priests and victims of dandyism
submit, from refinement of dress to the perilous fe ats of the sporting field, is “no more
than a system of gymnastics designed to fortify the wall and discipline the soul.” The
dandy’s bodily attitudes are, accordingly…

relaxed but betray an inner energy, so that when yo ur eye lights upon one of
those privileged beings in whom the graceful and th e formidable are so
mysteriously blended, you think: ‘A rich man perhap s, but more likely an out-
of-work Hercules!’

The essence of the dandy’s inner spiritual process is, according to Baudelaire, the
eradication of crude passions, and the destroying o f triviality – all of which he leaves to
vulgar mortals. The dandy achieves a haughty exclus iveness and air of authority and,
above all, emotional coldness. It is this “air of c oldness which comes from an
unshakeable determination not to be moved” that Bau delaire identifies as the
distinguishing characteristic of the dandy’s beauty . That is what separates the dandy from
l’homme sensible moderne, modern sensitive man, who is distinguished by a ner vous and
passionate temperament, by his sensitive heart, and by his attunement to sorrow.
By identifying the dandy’s emotional coldness Baude laire is following the
conventions of the genre. The author of an article on Brummell in Blackwood’s Edinburgh
Magazine , printed just four years after Brummell’s death, i dentified as the key to true
dandyism this same character of being “chill as the poles to the indulgences of others”. 8
The dandy would also be “magnanimously mean, ridicu lously wise, and contemptibly
clever…” And the idea of ‘aloofness,’ ‘serenity,’ ‘ detachment,’ comes up again and again.
Barbey d’Aurevilly claimed for the dandy the “seren ity of the ancients in the midst of
modern agitation and restlessness.” 9 Noel Coward called it “Immense calm with your
heart pounding.” And it is what W. Teignmouth Shore meant when he wrote, in 1911,
that although some “advance the theory that a man p ossessed of a mind cannot be a
dandy; as a matter of fact the reverse is the truth ; he must possess mind, but not a
heart.” 10

8 Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, 1844
9 Rhodes, p. 393
10 D’Orsay, or the Complete Dandy, 1911

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It must not be thought that the cold aloofness impl ies seriousness. As I’ll explain
in a minute, a dandy is not serious about anything. His serenity and emotional
detachment are commonly expressed as laughter.
This cold air of superiority, of authority, this ha ughty exclusiveness, is what the
philosophers of dandyism in the mid-nineteenth-cent ury interpreted as the dandy’s
‘aristocratic’ manner. And this ‘aristocratic’ feat ure is, I think, no coincidence. Real-life
early nineteenth-century dandies were generally fro m middle-class backgrounds and they
typically aspired to aristocracy. Consistent with t heir diagnosis of modern society’s
decadence was the belief that the old aristocracy w as failing, and would fall, and that a
new aristocracy would have to take its place. But i nstinctive dandy individualism
determined that it would be an aristocracy of chara cter rather than one of birth. The
principle of aristocracy is also reflected in what seem to be the uniformly reactionary
political sentiments of dandies. Here, I think, we must be prepared to have the dominant
egalitarian emotionalism of our own time injured, t hough the particularly squeamish can
take comfort from knowing that the political opinio ns of dandies were at the time
generally thought to be, as our author in Chambers’s Journal writes, “ludicrous in the
extreme.” 11
Because the dandy is emotionally emancipated from c oncern for the vulgarian,
for his social polar opposite whom Carlyle satirica lly called the ‘Drudge,’ any degree of
democracy is too much. “Give it additional strength ,” says the dandy, “and it will
overwhelm both throne and state.” 12 Baudelaire identified Joseph de Maistre – the
Savoyard father of European ‘throne-and-altar’ cons ervatism – as his greatest political
influence. The social conditions required for the r eappearance of dandies in the world
are, it seems, a sense of cultural decay tied to th e threat of increased democratic power.
The true dandy was uniformly interpreted, from the 1840s onward, as the last bright
expression of dying aristocratic supremacy.
These are, then, the basic themes of the philosophy of dandyism. You’ll have
noted, I suppose, that I have not formulated them a s rules. This is because obedience to
rules is thought to be alien to dandyism. When a ma n attempts to follow rules of conduct
and belief he falls into mere imitation, and is rev ealed not to be a dandy at all. The dandy
must be an original. One recent writer on the subject is Thorsten Botz-B ornstein. In his

11 ‘The Dandies,’ Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature Science an d Arts, 1861
12 ‘The Dandies,’ Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature Science an d Arts, 1861

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article, ‘Rule-following in Dandyism: “Style” as an Overcoming of “Rule” and
“Structure”’ (1995), Botz-Bornstein notes that…

It is possible to follow certain rules which consti tute the being of dandyism but
not everybody who does so is a dandy. …one of the f irst rule[s] of dandyism is
to follow no rules at all. 13

And he continues:

The false French dandies, on the other hand, do not possess this sophisticated
double-consciousness. When they step out into the s treet, they wear a uniform,
constantly worrying about the fit of their neckclot hs and the elegance of their
gait… The bad dandy plays at being a dandy in imita ting the image of a dandy. 14

The true dandy, then, does not imitate.
Botz-Bornstein’s article is a lovely little piece. But on the whole I think it’s clearly
nonsense – and I think it’s meant to be. He builds on the literature of the period in
question in order, ostensibly, to provide an accoun t of dandyism that emphasises the
essentially anarchic spirit of this curious ancient cult. But it gradually becomes clear that
the essay is itself an act of dandyism. He handles and twists his material with aplomb; he
mocks the philosophy of ‘rule-following,’ ‘language -games,’ and structuralism by
adopting its own language and using it against itse lf – but the satire is ambiguous,
because of a subtlety that would go over the head o f the serious man. Furthermore he
leaves almost all of his quotations in French (arbi trary use of French is identified by
Carlyle as one of the marks of dandyism); he deligh ts in paradoxical logic, and generally
follows the rules of academic writing but with a pl ayful attitude – which is the chief
characteristic he identifies of dandyism. Where, fo r instance, the born-aristocrat or
‘gentleman’ follows the rules of society without en thusiasm, the dandy turns the body of social
rules, which he perfectly understands, into a game. And the only rule of this game is style .15 This is
the delightful piece of anti-logic he uses. The dan dy’s lightness of style is how he
overcomes social rules and structure without follow ing more rules. As Balzac says, the
laws of elegance are produced by man at the moment he follows them. 16 The law of style

13 Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, 1995, p. 285
14 Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, 1995, p. 289
15 Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, 1995, p. 288
16 See Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, 1995, p. 290

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is immediate. This is why his stoic indifference is not a formula , but is “created anew” in
his “disciplined play.” “The liberty of the dandy,” Botz-Bornstein thinks, “is so total that
he lives in a domain beyond freedom and slavery and with this he enters the domain of
game.” 17 As I said before, I think he’s taking the piss.
One final contribution of Botz-Bornstein’s that I w ant to mention is the
difference he identifies between the dandy and the snob. Both are above the vulgarian,
the drudge, but “the dandy is a person who takes no thing seriously, not even himself; the
snob, on the other hand, takes his own person and e verything which is linked to it so
seriously that it makes the dandy laugh.” 18 The snob, whether he is an aristocrat or a
bourgeois (a ‘careerist’) believes with the utmost sincerity the rules of the game of high
society. The snob is never a player, though he ofte n aspires to be one. He always follows
his rules with unimaginative seriousness. Thus the snob, “even when he aspires to be a
dandy, does not want style but race. He wishes to create a solid race of dandyism whose
definition is unambiguously elitist.” But, this hoa xer Botz-Bornstein concludes,
“Through his fight against all snobbish metaphysics the dandy becomes the founder of
the first post-metaphysical hermeneutics of non-fou ndation which he presents in the
form of a mimetic philosophy of style.”
In our own time dandyism is as rare as ever. L’homme sensible moderne has the upper
hand, I think, though he takes some strange forms. We are surrounded, here on our
decadent campus as much as anywhere, by fops – not by dandies. This morning I walked
to campus behind one advertising his foppery by wea ring flip-flops at this time of year.
The fop follows the rules of affectation in order t o communicate a kind of personal
status based on qualities uncultivated by him – per sonal features that are accidental: good
breeding, for instance (which I am not opposed to per se ). Whatever is displayed on the
outside by the fop is intended to communicate mater ial status, and an inner
phantasmagoria based on receiving experiences estim ated by magnitude and quantity.
Foppery is not a way of being that brings outside a nd inside together through beauty,
grace, and activity based on realizing good taste .
Perhaps the most revealing expression of our democr atic and decadent age’s
rejection of the dandy is his classification as a p sychological condition. It is not, of
course, actually called dandyism – what used to be called ‘the sociopath’ i s these days, in
the ever-shifting terminology of these pseudo-scien ces, called ‘antisocial personality

17 Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, 1995, p. 290
18 Thorsten Botz-Bornstein, 1995, p. 292

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disorder’ – but the features as defined by the Amer ican Psychiatric Association are
strikingly similar:

1. failure to conform to social norms with respect to lawful behaviors as indicated by
repeatedly performing acts that are grounds for arr est;
2. deception, as indicated by repeatedly lying, use of aliases, or conning others for personal
pleasure;
3. impulsiveness or failure to plan ahead;
4. consistent irresponsibility, as indicated by repeat ed failure to sustain consistent work
behavior or honor financial obligations;
5. lack of remorse, as indicated by being indifferent
…and, according to Theodore Millon, “a tendency to exhibit narcissistic
features.”
Thus the hostility of our age to dandyism. I will c lose by adding to all this
nonsense my favourite line of Baudelaire’s funny li ttle essay: The dandy represents, he
thinks, “the last spark of heroism amid decadence.”

Fin