Tremaine

• Posted by mgr on October 8th, 2007 filed in DER DANDY IN DER LITERATUR, Ward
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Tremaine, or the man of refinement by Robert Plumer Ward was published in 1826 and is one of the three fashionable novels that became to be most widely known as dandy novels; the other two being Benjamin Disraeli’s Vivian Grey and Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Pelham. This is how Tremaine is portrayed:

»It was TREMAINE ; a name known in the political world for talents and integrity ; in the fashionable, as an ornament of the higher circles; and in the female, as belonging to a man whom all prudent mothers wished to obtain for their daughters, and many a daughter for herself. He was in truth a person of great polish, refined taste, and high reputation.«

Tremaine is a misanthrope due to this reflective character. In his opinion »it is the world that is dull and uninteresting«. Thus, Tremaine retires from the fashionable world of London to his country house: »Here, however, I can retire into myself here keep
the designing, the treacherous, and the vulgar, all at an equal distance.« He intends to view the world from a distance and indulge in leisure, »the prime, the only sweetener of life! the only desideratum of a wise man!« Tremaine’s rule, »if I have one, is to have no rule at all. If I had any method except not to be methodical, I should die of ennui.«

»We have said that Tremaine was in the meridian of his age. He had formerly read much, and he had lived a great deal in the world ; though chiefly in the highest circles of it : a sort of natural or early acquired fastidiousness having, even as a younger brother, forbidden much mixture with any other.
Being the younger son of a younger brother, he was designed, having much quickness of parts, for a learned profession. There was a considerable family living which might have made him easy in fortune; and accordingly, he gave some little time to Divinity. But this pursuit did not prevent the cultivation of those high acquaintance among whom his own connections threw him, and whose manners and notions were particularly pleasing to his frame of mind. He indeed at first loved the court, for the sunshine with which it often dazzles a young bosom ; and he thought at one time of pursuing a court life ; but soon drew back, from finding that his heart had need of better things. In short, if fashionable society had charms for him, literature and reflection had more ; or at least it was always doubtful to which he was most devoted. This disposition at once to refinement and sensibility, pushed as far as it would go, formed at length a peculiarity in his character, which never quitted him ; nor was it at all diminished by his being, at the same time, not only peculiarly alive to the charms of female society, but fastidiously nice in his notions of female character. That with much susceptibility, therefore, he was still a bachelor, though approaching the middle of life that he should even have seemed to take his leave of the sex is not at all inconsistent. His fastidiousness, though always allied to integrity and feeling, coloured, indeed, all his pursuits ; his earlier conduct scarcely more than his subsequent fate.«

»He had formed to himself strange notions (not, indeed, arising from personal vanity, but from feelings less likely to make him happy) of the power of his situation, combined with his acquirements, always to make his mind suffice to itself, without the least dependence upon the world.«

The dandy requires some financial background and Tremaine is happy to inherit an immense estate through the deaths of an uncle and cousin nearly at the same time.

He once experienced an unhappy love-affair but once »Cured of love, and particularly of village love, he now commenced what he had long meditated, and partly had begun, the tour of Europe; and he betook himself with vigour to the study of the men, manners and institutions, the arts, policy and resources of foreign countries.«

Back in England, Tremaine entered parliament and, according to the dandy’s need for independence, entered into opposition. »He was at pains to have it believed that he stood by himself, owned fealty to no one, and would take it as an affront to be solicited into party. It so happened, however, that he thought this independence could only be shewn by invariably voting, and frequently speaking with his vote, against every measure, good, bad, or indifferent, which the government brought forward. (…)

As to the fact, it is certain, that though his heart was a sufferer, and a cruel one, it was in a manner and with a party far different from what is usually understood when an affair of the heart is mentioned ; for the disappointment was with one of his own sex, and politics and friendship, not love, sustained the wound. In a word, one of the leaders of his party, a man not only of the highest rank and attainments, but of a nature seemingly, and perhaps really, so amiable and sincere, that to enjoy his confidence, and be distinguished by his friendship, was the pride and honour of Tremaine’s life, this man failed him.

It was in one of those negociations for an arrangement of the government, which the highest power in the state fondly thought might reconcile all jarring interests, and heal the wounds of his distracted country, that a blow was given to Tremaine’s best feelings, which finally sickened and disgusted him with public life. What is worse, it turned even his private friendship into bitterness, and made him renounce his confidence in man, as before he had renounced it in woman.«

»Tremaine’s wish for retirement was not a little fostered by the course of his former reading, and, as far as he could understand himself, by the inclination of his taste. He had been bred a scholar. Homer, Horace, Virgil, and Theocritus were familiar to him; and in the closet of the student of divinity and of law, and even in the tent of the soldier, they had soothed and flattered his imagination.«

»He announced Belmont as the seat of his retirement from a world he was resolved to abandon ; and felt no diminution of his resolution, in planning, at an enormous cost, the elegant scene of his future studies, future independence, and future happiness. (…) With these prospective pleasures, duties, and occupations, Tremaine gave a farewell dinner to a large yet select company of his friends, in which professors of politics, professors of belles-lettres, and professors of good breeding were pleasantly mixed. The savoir vivre shone out on this occasion with a splendour seldom equalled, and it was observed that the master of the feast was never less listless or splenetic, and never seemingly in such good-humour with the world, as while thus in the act of taking leave of it, perhaps for ever.«

Miss Lyttleton explicitly calls him a dandy, »only a little old, but refined, and very solemn, and very exclusive, and all that.«

»Now, amongst Tremaine’s weaknesses, we have not concealed his love of fashion, spite of ten thousand professions, which all went to level it at the feet of philosophy. Often had he been known to say, that a wise man was always independent of a thing so fleeting, so instrinsically insignificant ; yet no man more accurately than himself exacted, and paid the full measure of consideration which it demanded. Born a man of quality, though born also for something better, he gave a consequence in the world to a thousand things, which in his closet he said were of no consequence at all. To be quizzed, much more to be what is called cut by any one, never, indeed, entered his contemplation ; but had it so happened, though by a duke, or royalty itself, it would have been a crime ICBSCB majestatis, never to be forgiven.

With this disposition, he was not unobservant of that tyrannous power which certain sprigs of fashion, and certain men of wit, in the fashionable clubs, exercise over every body else, in all the points that are deemed legitimate objects of quizzing. Their despotism is so great, that not even he stopt to ascertain its real nature, or how it came to be acquired. It was enough that all bowed, or seemed to bow to it; and he had himself sat sufficiently often in the window at White’s, to conceive almost as high an idea of its power, as a judge has of the dignity of the bench.

His detractors (for he had them) went, indeed, so far as to say s the only man for whom he ever shewed any real deference was a certain beau, who, spite of all his wants of birth, fortune, and connection, had, by the force of a masterly genius, acquired such an ascendancy over the dandies, as to be called their sovereign.

It is certain this beau had not spared Tremaine, who, he said, with all his claims to reputation (which on the whole he was disposed to allow), had yet an original defect in his education, in having studied the law. It was observed that Tremaine not only
forgave this piece of temerity, but conceived a high respect for the genius, abilities, and powers of him who was guilty of it, and there was a sort of fashionable alliance between them ever afterwards.«

»Among Tremaine’s peculiar and lofty notions, might be ranked those respecting the ceremonies between the sexes. It was not, as may have been seen, that he was cold in his nature, nor even that he was of the vieille cour, though leaning perhaps a little that way; but as his general reserve shunned every kind of familiarity, he was disposed to view with very little approbation the perfect ease and nonchalance that mark the beaux and belles of the present day.«

Tremaine’s neighbour on his country estate remarks the artificiality of Tremaine’s life: »it is to you I address myself you, who sacrifice so much to the polish of artificial life, that I fear you have lost your relish for a natural one.«

Tremaine, tells his valet de chambre, thinks »Voltaire and Rousseau, and Monsieur Louvet, les meilleurs ecrivains du monde : my master be de man of pleasure comme moi, and he no believe a word of your religion at all.«

Mrs. Watson tells us: »I assure you he is all the fashion in London, is generally out with the gayest all the night long ; and there is no young lady that would not be glad to have him.«

»He was always, you know, eccentric ; thinking and acting like no other man. No woman of his acquaintance comes up, it seems, to his standard as a wife.«

»UPON forms and ceremonies, no man was so strong as Tremaine ; and the prejudice he felt against what he called prejudice was so great, that at the hazard of hurting, and even displeasing not only his friend, but his friend’s daughter, he reverted to what had fallen from Evelyn in respect to the sabbatical institution.«

In respect to religion, Tremaine affects: »I never could bear any stated hour of prayer, any ceremonial, any thing that I call mechanical, in a matter which must always be beyond the reach of mechanism.«

»How different from the Tremaine of his youth, or even of his later years, when the hero of high life, in the assemblies of London or Paris, the champion of party, or the fastidious criticizer, yet devoted admirer of the sex, he sparkled through a whole night, amidst a blaze of artificial elegance, which, however flattering to his senses, never, as we have seen, satisfied his heart!«

Tremaine defines the source of his misanthrophy and disbelieve: »It was reasoning, reasoning that could not satisfy me, but brought all into doubt ; it was this that deprived me so long of this precious feeling. (…) Immersed in pleasure, in ambition, in short, in the world, I own I thought we had at least a right to be what we are, and because it was our nature, never thought that it might be our nature to be otherwise.« (…) All that he had ever relied upon as valid in his scepticism, had been made to totter, and new and heavenly light seemed to burst through the breaches that he felt had been effected in opinions which he had thought impregnable. (…) his scepticism was solely of the head, while genuine religion and natural piety, had, at least, originally possessed his heart. (…) it was his understanding only, not his heart, that had been perverted, and that from the beginning he never had been able to escape into absolute disbelief, though his refinements in reason, as well as every thing else, had plunged him into doubts, from which he had in vain tried to extricate himself by his own powers. (…) »It is too certain I basked in the world, till I was spoiled by it ; and the doubts I allowed to beguile me becoming troublesome, I silenced them into conviction, on what I thought the easiest side, in order that they might not interfere with other pursuits.«

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