Beau's Art

THE DANDY: BRUMMELL TO BEERBOHM (372 pp.)--Ellen Moers--Viking ($6).

The Duke of Wellington approved of elegance, but he felt obliged to advise his splendidly uniformed Grenadier Guards that their behavior was "not only ridiculous but unmilitary" when they rode into battle on a rainy day with their umbrellas raised. Such peacockery startles the 20th century male, who trembles dizzily at the brink of foppishness when he folds a handkerchief into the breast pocket of his sack suit. The rich man of today dresses more plainly, if anything, than his short-form employee, and there are social observers who theorize that the tycoon tries to be inconspicuous because he feels guilty about his wealth.

Things were different at the beginning of the 19th century. The eventual winner of the class war, the junior executive, had not even been invented. The upper classes of England, alarmed at Jacobin rumblings from France, put down the undeserving poor with vigor. And one of the battlefields on which they did so, in the view of Author Moers, was that of dress. Leading a languid but deadly charge for the aristocracy was a new and resplendent creature, the dandy (whom the author distinguishes from the mere fop by the social forces that created him). Thomas Carlyle wrote unsympathetically that a dandy is "a Man whose trade, office, and existence consist in the wearing of Clothes." He ignored the dandy's first function--to prove, merely by being himself, the unbridgeable distance between the elite and "the great unwashed" (a phrase used by dandified Politician-Author Edward Bul-wer-Lytton to describe literary critics).

A Superior Valet. First and greatest of the dandies, of course, was George Bryan Brummell. The son of a well-to-do bureaucrat (he confounded criticism of his birth by claiming that "my father was a very superior valet, and kept his place all his life"), Beau Brummell in his teens became the friend of the fat, feckless Prince of Wales. By dressing with unheard-of care and severity--he used only two colors, blue for his coat and buff for his waistcoat and trousers--and by developing a haughty silence that could strike like a thunderclap, Brummell made himself the embodiment of bon ton in London society. From 1800 until he fled England to escape creditors in 1816, "his dictates were obeyed in all the great issues of existence: the curve of a brim, the blend of a snuff, the turn of a phrase, the ways to pass those long boring years when wars were being fought, laws were being debated, history was being made."

Dandyism flourished, exquisite and exclusive, until the passage of the Reform Bill in 1832 (which shifted the balance of power from the Lords to the Commons). Such men as "Poodle" Byng, ''Apollo" Raikes, and the gorgeous Count D'Orsay followed or improved upon Brummell's styles; collars, stiff with whalebone, rose above the ears, cravats required pounds of starch, and coats became bosomy with padding. French aristocrats, in a wave of Anglophilia, embraced the fad--although, the author notes, they confused the thin-wristed dandy with his county cousin, the fox-hunting buck.

Truman Shirts. There is little evidence that dandyism did much lasting harm to anyone. In fact, it may be argued that it diverted men's energies from grimmer pursuits. But the Victorian mind was horrified, although fascinated, by the dandies. Thomas Carlyle, an impoverished Scot, was scathing in Sartor Resartus, as was Thackeray in Vanity Fair. Writing learnedly, but much too earnestly for her slender subject. Author Moers, wife of Martin (Madison Avenue, U.S.A.) Mayer, charts the dwindling course of dandyism. The affectation spread to Dickens, whose cream waistcoats doomed him, in Victorian society, to remain a gent instead of a gentleman, to Oscar Wilde, who cultivated-dandyism to reap publicity, and finally to the last great dandy (and one of the last great essayists), Max Beerbohm.

Beerbohm dressed exquisitely, of course, but two other accomplishments were necessary to earn him his place as Brummell's last successor: the art of insult and, as the author observes, "the art of getting away with it." When, offended by the scent of the new century, he exiled himself to Rapallo in 1910, Beerbohm showed flawless taste; barbarians in Truman shirts and Bermuda shorts were massing just beyond the horizon.

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