Treatise on Elegant Living. Honore de Balzac

       TRANSLATOR’S INTRODUCTION

      ‘Giving style” to one’s character—a great and rare art! It is exercised by those who see all the strengths and weaknesses of their own natures and then comprehend them in an artistic plan until everything appears as art and reason and even weakness delights the eye….

      —Friedrich Nietzsche

      AS LONG AS CLOTHES make the man, the dandy will continue to cast his shadow into the twenty-first century. He may at times seem like a pale shadow, an outline without actual content—the ghost of an apparition of a man: superficiality remains, after all, one of the more superficial attributes ascribed to the dandy. But in an age when history and heritage are fading, where appearances are looked upon as deceiving while also accepted as truth, and where rebellion and conformity exchange masks, the legacy of the dandy remains illuminating. Given high capitalism’s reduction of being to having, there is even a sort of salvational aura to this figure of the dandy, who two centuries ago broke down the barriers between aesthetics and the everyday, renounced the “busy life” of production and utility, and instead turned his own life into a work of art.

      What was the dandy, though? If the dandy denies predecessors, and pointedly leaves no progeny, he does nonetheless have a history, and Honoré de Balzac may be credited as one of the first to have made a conscious attempt to imagine this history. Its starting point is incontestable: be he fop, urban narcissist, metrosexual, or artist formerly known as Prince, every dandy bears allegiance to Beau Brummell, the original dandy—the only dandy, perhaps, that ever truly existed. For Brummell left no model to emulate, no handbook to follow, no anecdotes to relate, and no real clues for posterity to understand what had made him who he was—what had prompted Lord Byron to claim that he would have rather been Brummell than Napoleon. Even when alive, Brummell was more of an abstraction than a man, and with his absence, dandyism necessarily became as much a theory as a practice, and the man as much a literary figure as a historical one. Brummell has become an ineffable archetype; if he does not have quite the same literary stature of Don Juan or Hamlet, he could still easily rub shoulders with the likes of Oblomov or Sherlock Holmes (if, that is, rubbing shoulders were not an activity he abhorred).

      Born in 1778, George Bryan Brummell reigned over the early nineteenth century in England and the rather contemptible period of the British Regency: exclusivism held sway, a reactionary idleness filled in for a crumbling aristocracy, and the unspoken rules for initiates able to afford the game were established not so much by George IV, but by his rebellious favorite. Brummell was, as Barbey d’Aurevilly put it, the “autocrat of opinion.” The measuring rod for every action (and more significantly, every nonaction), was fashionability: marriage and women were not fashionable; going into debt and being idle were. It is hard not to side with Thomas Carlyle in his declaration of what was essentially class war against that exclusive minority—a war he described as being between the Dandies and the “Drudges.”

      What would have been a fairly clear-cut class antagonism, however, was complicated by Brummell’s background: for if he acted the aristocrat, lived the life of an aristocrat, and was courted by the aristocracy, Brummell was no aristocrat. He was a new kind of autocrat, natural-born in that he came from no family (to his middle-class family’s understandable chagrin),