Dandies

• Posted by mgr on July 4th, 2008 filed in Zeitdokumente
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All the discussion that is at present raging as to whether soldiers are to be put back into scarlet and gold instead of khaki reminds us that man is a natural dandy and only ceases to be a dandy when he has to take seriously to work. It is probable that if he had remained uncorrupted by the serpent and the woman in Eden, and so had been able to live idle for ever, he would have learned to dress as brilliantly as a parrot and would be doing so still. Clothes, it is often supposed, are a mark of his fall. His sins made him modest, and he did his best to hide himself. As soon, however, as he had begun to overflow into the cooler regions of the earth, he was bound, we fancy, either to dress himself or to grow fur. The human skin is not a sufficient protection against the English climate. And, as soon as he had learned to dress for use, he would have been tempted to take a step further and dress for beauty. After all, the birds never fell, and yet they dress like princes. The baboon never fell, and yet he dresses like a lord. As it is, however, we may take it for granted that the evolution of man’s costume has been on different lines from those on which it would have proceeded had he remained innocent. If he had remained innocent, he would never have had to fight or to struggle for riches. There would have been no soldiers and no barons. His costume would therefore have been designed for beauty, not for boasting. he might have been a dandy, but he would not have been a brave. That the old-fashioned costume of the soldier is in some respects at least descended from that of the primitive brave we may infer from the use of plumage in the head-dress of various regiments. Among the Red Indians, no part of the costume was more significant than the feathers. One could even tell a Red Indian’s record in war by the way in which his feathers were worn. If a Red Indian belonging to the Hidatse tribe wore a feather with a tuft of down on the tip you knew that he had killed an enemy. Among the Dakotas, a black-bordered notch cut in the feather proved that the wearer had cut his enemy’s throat and borne off his scalp. If only the throat had been cut, and the scalp left shamefully behind, the markings on the feather were different. It is said that feathers did not appear in the costume of English soldiers till the reign of Henry V., but we may take it that the instinct that led to their use was much the same as that which prevailed among the Red Indians. There is something challenging, something that appeals delightfully to human pride, in the appearance of a feather on a human head. We still sympathise with the infant son of Hector as he plays with the pseudo-plumage in his father’s helmet. Unquestionably, Christian Europe took to feathers with an enthusiasm it has never abandoned till the present day. Women, it is said, did not take to them till the time of Henry VIII., but they have made up for their dilatoriness since. At the present time we have a Plumage Bill under discussion which would have been unnecessary but for the fact that no considerations even of ordinary humanity will prevent women from wearing feathers. Side by side with this, Mr. Churchill is carrying through what is practically another Plumage Bill for the restoration of feathers in the costume of brave men. Now that the stress of war is over, he wishes to get back as far as possible to the habits of primitive man. He feels that the defeat of Germany has given the world a breathing-space for dandyism again. He forgets that, in the older world, this particular form of dandyism survived because it could be carried into action. A man in those day fought better because of his feathers. They added not to his danger, but to his daring in battle. It is possible even that he wore them as a charm and that he felt that the feather of an eagle would give him the strength of an eagle. To the present day, perhaps, women have a vague notion that the feathers of a kingfisher give them the beauty of a kingfisher. Alas, bravery and beauty cannot be purchased in a milliner’s shop. Man lives in a pathetic hope of being able to increase himself by some such external magic. He cannot add a cubit to this stature, but he can at least add a feather to this cap. He can even add a feather to his little green Tyrolese hat. He is not born an eagle or a peacock, but he believes that he can disguise himself as one. In other words, he is not a mere animal, but an artist.

There is surely a sort of modesty in all this dressing-up. Man is rather ashamed of what he looks like unaided by art. He knows that, if he escaped from shirt and trousers, he would look much more like a forked radish, or a freak carrot, than like a Greek god. In the nineteenth century many people persuaded themselves that the human form was essentially beautiful, and they hired men and women to stand naked in studios in the hope that by contemplation of their beauty they would be able to recapture for their fellows the lost beauties of Olympus. Who that has ever been in a studio does not shudder at the memory of those sad spectacles? Man naked looks less like a god than like something that would be sold by the pound in an East End ham-and-beef shop. He was the least of the animals, poor thing, as one saw him being examined by the Army medical boards during the war. One looked in vain at the time for any example of his race corresponding to the Hermes of Praxiteles. He had not even the grace of a tadpole swimming about in a child’s glass jampot. So appalling is the truth about the human figure that a realistic town councillor at a Kentish resort was driven the other day to dry out against mixed bathing, on the ground that, by bathing together, men and women were beginning to see in some measure what each other look like and in their disgust were refusing to marry. He called out for the old woollen disguise as the only means of saving the race. According to his philosophy, it is obviously not nature but art that is the fruitful parent of love. There are idealists, on the other hand, who take an entirely opposite view. They hold that man has lapsed into his present deplorable shape only because he has ceased to go naked. If he would but consent to go naked again, they assure us, he would find some means of regaining the Olympian graces instead of as at present depending for them on his tailor. He is now, they hold, simply a victim of his own laziness. Let him sell his wardrobe to an old-clothes man, and go dancing and prancing in the open air, and his feet once more shall be beautiful upon the mountains. We fear this is a counsel of perfection. In the climate of this all but perfect island, the foot that goes bare is as graceless as the foot that is bound in the skin of a calf, and the body that goes bare will acquire a still more peculiar hue than the body that hides itself in the wool of a sheep. There is nothing for it but to make the best of a bad job. For better or worse man must continue to be a clothes-wearing animal. And being a clothes-wearing animal, he will aspire to be a fine-clothes-wearing animal in so far as this is consistent with his getting all the money and amusement he desires. Clothes are his favourite form of make-believe. By the aid of clothes he can acquire the appearance of possessing all for which he longs - youth, beauty and riches. In the unsophisticated days of Queen Victoria a number of gentlemen even painted their faces in order to look and to feel young. The most characteristically English statesman of the time, Palmerston, (who, as Mr. Shaw would say, was of course an Irishman), rouged, as we learn in the new volumes of the Life of Disraeli. Disraeli said that the two bravest men he had ever known used rouge. We are accustomed to pretend that men who think a great deal about their personal appearance are effeminate in the sense of being weakly creatures. There is nothing in history to warrant this belief. There was little that was effeminate about the Elizabethans, yet they were among the supreme dandies in the annals of this country. The costume of soldiers, again, has always been more showy than the costume of shopkeepers. We do not doubt that it is the shopkeepers and not the soldiers who have all but completely driven fine costume out of English life, so far at least as the men are concerned. Englishmen never got over being called a nation of shopkeepers by Napoleon. They turned his sneer into a boast, and nowadays even a general slips at the earliest opportunity out of his finery and does his best to look like a retired house-agent. This, too, is make-believe. Other nations have conquered their neighbours by looking like soldiers. Englishmen have conquered we forget how much of the globe by looking like innocent tradesmen. The English kept saying that they were not a martial race till other people believed them. They merely meant that, as soldiers, they wished to remain invisible. They were the first nation to realise the advantages of invisibility in war.

This, perhaps, helps to explain the English suspicion of fine dress in men. They discovered that the finely-dressed Stuarts brought them almost into the position of a subject nation, and they called in the Guelphs in order to disguise themselves in simplicity. The tendency ever since has been towards a dress that tells not ales. There have been occasional reactions towards finery on the part of those who had forgotten the plight into which finery had brought the country in the seventeenth century. It is odd to find even so great a Whig as Fox a leader among the Macaronis, who not only succeeded tin making macaroni an English dish which children detest to this day, but amazed their contemporaries with their white silk breeches and stockings, their boundless neckcloths, their diamond buckles and their red-heeled shoes. Fox, however, was a very fat and ugly man, and it would have ben poor sport for him to go about dressed as a Puritan. Poor Beau Nash, again, dressed well only because he was anxious to look like a gentleman. But even he was enough of an ordinary Englishman to make utilitarian excuses for not dressing as other men did. “He always wore a white hat,” we are told by Oliver Goldsmith, “and, to apologise for this singularity, said he did it purely to secure it from being stolen.” Beau Brummel, the grandson of a shopkeeper, appears to have been singular, not in the cut of his clothes, but in his care about clothes. He dressed exquisitely rather than eccentrically. Still, the fact - or the fiction - that he burst into tears of distress on seeing an imperfectly-cut coat on the Prince of Wales suggests that he, too, was in his imagination hankering after the atmosphere of the Stuarts. Every outburst of aestheticism in clothes since that time has been simply a reaction against Puritanism. As might be expected, the lesser artists and men of letters have been prominent among the reactionaries. Lord Lytton’s stays and Oscar Wilde’s knee-breeches are among the memorable eccentricities of the nineteenth century. At the same time, while the average Englishman has no patience with eccentricity of costume, he still believes in formality of costume in most of the professions and at the dinner-table. The lawyer wears a wig, the bishop his gaiters, the butcher his blue apron, the commissionaire his braid. The bishop, however, is the only one who carries his formal costume into private life. The judge does not go out to tea in his wig, nor the butcher in his apron. In this the soldier is of their mind rather than of the bishop’s. The present dispute about the soldier’s costume, indeed is not a dispute as to whether his formal costume shall also be his informal one, but as to whether he shall have two formal costumes - one for peace-time and one for war. Mr. Churchill apparently wishes soldiers to look like soldiers - at least when there is no war on. It is a dangerous path to take. The Stuarts looked like soldiers: the Germans looked like soldiers. Mr. Churchill, we fear, has never rasped the essentials of the great English philosophy of disguise.

Quoted from: The New Statesman. June 19, 1920.

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