Читать книгу Treatise on Elegant Living - Honoré de Balzac - Страница 7

‘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), and sired none; he was for all intents and purposes a self-sired autocrat, whose example in dignified manners, elegant dress, and stoic distinction could eventually be followed by members of any class and occupation—provided, of course, they had access to a sufficient amount of funds to maintain a life of leisure.

But Brummell was more than an infiltrator of ranks; he was a new kind of individual. If it was his nature to live beyond his means (insolvency was the inevitable outcome for Brummell and his followers), it was his legacy to live beyond society’s understanding. Whereas the snob (a different character altogether, albeit one understandably confused with the Regency dandies) maneuvered within society by laws and manners established by that society, the dandy operated in accordance with laws of his own making, and for an audience that consisted of himself before anyone. The practice of elegance and taste was one that either passed unnoticed by anyone save the initiate, or one that shocked the populace; it could find an outlet in the reactionary politics of the secret society, or the more striking and rebellious form of modernist shock: the dandies were the first to employ the now normalized practice of shocking the bourgeoisie.

It took the French, however, to recognize and elaborate upon these still budding qualities of the dandy, and formulate an intellectual brand of aesthetic and social egoism that would inform modernism and would find its culmination in the figure of Charles Baudelaire. It would be in France that the dandy and the bohemian would become two sides of the same coin, the dandy simply having money, the bohemian doing without (it was even quite natural to start a dandy, as Baudelaire did, and finish a bohemian). And it is in France that the second, and most interesting, stage of dandyism took place.

There were three broad phases of dandyism: the social dandyism of Beau Brummell and the early nineteenth-century Regency; the French intellectual dandyism of the mid-century; and what has become the more widely known commercial dandyism (what Ellen Moers referred to as “hedonistic dandyism”) of Oscar Wilde and the finde-siècle, a basically British chapter that in a roundabout way took its cue from the French rather than the British Regency. It was a somewhat muddled cue, though, blending dandyism with the decadent movement that had since taken shape, resulting in the amalgamated “aesthete” who bore but faint resemblance to the original puritanical mold of Brummell.

The French themselves took a muddled cue from the Regency dandy, though, partly owing to a strong early nineteenth-century Anglomania in France that, as Moers put it, “made the dandy and the romantic one and the same, though the two had scarcely met at home.”¹ The combination would prove to be productive, however, and it helped turn the French dandy into a crucial transitional figure between the late eighteenth-century libertine and the late nineteenth-century decadent.² Moers described the dandy as being the “epitome of selfish irresponsibility … ideally free of all human commitments that conflict with taste: passions, moralities, ambitions, politics or occupations.”³ By exchanging the words “taste” and “passions” over the colon dividing them in this definition, though, one could essentially change this definition of the dandy to that of the libertine who preceded him.

This simple exchange of taste for passion, though, made for a world of pointed contrast between the two autocrats: if the libertine embraced his nature and pursued sexual pleasure by mastering others, the dandy denied his nature, mastered himself, and displayed what Barbey d’Aurevilly described as an “antique calm” and an “undecidedly intellectual sex.” If marriage and reproduction were both anathema to libertine and dandy, their reasons were opposite: for the libertine, they interfered with his private pleasures, while for the dandy, they interfered with his social persona. Whereas the libertine took an Enlightenment zest in vulgarity and blasphemy in the boudoir, the dandy, as impertinent as he may have been in the salon, could never be accused of vulgarity. If the libertine parleyed with invective and violence behind closed doors, the dandy’s weapon of choice was his social use of wit; if the libertine indulged in cruelty by stabbing his victims with pins and daggers, the dandy’s finest stabs were always the cut of his suit and the cutting remarks he reserved for friends and enemies alike. If the libertine removed his societal mask within the boudoir in order to drink in a victim’s blood, the dandy did the opposite:

“These Stoics of the boudoir drink their own blood under their mask and remain masked.”⁴

As Barbey d’Aurevilly concluded: “Passion is too true to be dandyesque.” But this opposition of nature and artifice actually points to the essential, common feature between Sade’s libertine and the dandy: their shared opposition to Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Romantic belief in the noble savage, the belief that man is essentially good when in a state of nature. Both libertine and dandy considered cruelty to be most natural, virtue an artificial construct, and egoism the only law worth obeying. But the dandy differed from the libertine in that he did not embrace this conception of the natural state, and instead chose to celebrate the excesses of artifice. When Baudelaire (in many ways Sade’s truest disciple) posited virtue and beauty as artificial constructs, his adoption of the dandy’s role and embracement of artifice ultimately turned him into something of a dark moralist.

It is also on this point that the French dandy signaled a significant break from both Romantic and libertine, both of whom, despite their opposing outlooks on nature, ultimately aimed at an absorption into nature, a loss of the self via the frenzied throes of natural or sexual carnage. This quest for self-dissipation would find its echo in the decadent, whose apposite, almost Romantic, withdrawal into artifice turned him into not just an antihero, but even a nonhero. The dandy, on the other hand, though he shunned nature, only used artifice and remained utterly dependant on society. Without an observer, he was like the sound made by George Berkeley’s tree falling unobserved in a wood: he would in effect cease to exist. As long as he had an audience, the dandy relinquished his self-identity to no one: self-control, dignity, and pride yielded nothing to emotion; paradox battled against any manner of conformity; and death itself, far from holding any dark attraction, was merely something that happened to other people. Nature has no heroes, and artifice consumes them; it was the middle ground of dandyism that made it, as Baudelaire put it, “the last spark of heroism amid decadence.”⁵

This new heroic formulation of the dandy would be established by three essential and defining texts of French dandyism, all composed by exceptional men who were themselves significant and very personalized embodiments of dandyism: Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly’s 1845 On Dandyism and George Brummell, Charles Baudelaire’s 1863 cornerstone to modernism The Painter of Modern Life, and the treatise that helped pave the way for both them, Honoré de Balzac’s 1830 Treatise on Elegant Living.

Balzac’s Treatise stands at the threshold of French dandyism, marking a historical and theoretical shift that would either influence or herald the dandyism to come.⁶ Although intellectual dandyism is often considered to stem from Barbey d’Aurevilly’s classic work on Brummell, Balzac was the first to open the door. He wrote his treatise only a few months after George IV’s death, a death that officially signaled the end of Regency exclusivism, and thereby the end of Regency dandyism. It is significant that this end was directly followed by the beginnings of French dandyism, whose groundwork Balzac was helping to establish.

Even those familiar with Balzac’s novels, however, may be initially taken off guard by the notion of that giant presenting himself as an expert on elegance—let alone a self-proclaimed originator of, to use his own coinage, the new science of “elegantology.” Even more surprising may be the fact that Balzac considered himself something of a practitioner of the science. He was an odd manifestation of early French dandyism: taking his cues in dress from friends such as Eugène Sue and Lautour-Mézeray (both of whom make appearances in this treatise), Balzac proved to be more of a part-time dandy. The dandy memorialist Captain Gronow provided a particularly amusing assessment of the man’s elegance in practice: “The great enchanter was one of the oiliest and commonest looking mortals I ever beheld; being short and corpulent, with a broad florid face, a cascade of double chins, and straight greasy hair … [he] dressed in the worst possible taste, wore sparkling jewels on a dirty shirt front, and diamond rings on unwashed fingers….”⁷

Balzac did not, obviously, quite match up to the exacting standards he established in his treatise, and in the end, he himself probably did not see himself in the category. But he introduced a new category into the system, one placed squarely between the busy life and the elegant life: the thinking life of the artist. In Balzac’s words: “The artist is an exception: his idleness is work, and his work, repose; he is elegant and slovenly in turn; he dons, as he pleases, the plowman’s overalls, and determines the tails worn by the man in fashion; he is not subject to laws: he imposes them.”

This introduction of the category of artist would have lasting repercussions on dandyism, particularly the later dandyism of Baudelaire, who had no interest whatsoever in aristocracy, and who essentially presented himself to, and performed for (and ultimately rejected), the artist community. The category of artist is also what shapes Balzac’s portrayal of Brummell. Like most of his contemporaries, and despite Brummell’s presence in France (where he spent his last years in exile to escape his creditors), Balzac’s actual knowledge and understanding of the real Beau Brummell was superficial at best. The abstract nature of the figure of Brummell in France is illustrated by the fact that his very name was consistently misspelled (Balzac employed the spelling of “Brummel” that was standard in France at the time, but this has been adjusted for this translation). Barbey d’Aurevilly would later undertake his biographical portrait of Brummell without even knowing whether or not his subject had ever married; his portrait of the dandy was composed of carefully selected biographical facts which he assembled to create the personalized dandy he envisioned, rather than the dandy that had lived. It must be noted, then, that even though it had been written when Brummell was still alive, the Brummell who appears in Balzac’s treatise is pure fiction and inaccurate in a number of details (a few of which have been pointed out in the notes). What Balzac has him say, however, does the dandy justice. After poking some fun at the inevitable ravages of time upon the dandy (imagining a certain degree of portliness and a wig, details that fall short of the very depressing poverty and madness that in fact awaited Brummell in his final years), Balzac proceeds to envision him as the theorist, aphorist, and author that he never was in life. It is this effort that distinguishes Balzac’s approach to his subject, and it is a difference in evidence from his opening epigraph by Virgil: Mens agitat molem (Mind moves matter). If the effective and often accurate metaphor employed by the English anti-dandiacals described the dandy as an empty suit of clothes, Balzac here pointedly puts the man back into the suit. It is this shift that leads him to make what may at first be a surprising assertion midway through his treatise that the dandy is a “heresy of elegant living.” This dandy he refutes, though, is the dandy of the Regency, the dandy that is to be supplanted by the dandy he is heralding. The snobbery of two-dimensional dandyism was past, the dandy of gender and sexual politics was yet to come; this redefined dandyism, rooted in a redefined Brummell, was the dandyism of ambiguous tyranny, cynical defiance, reactionary rebellion, and budding modernism.

This new dandy also tempers Balzac’s essay, which can at times read fairly conservatively considering the July Revolution that had taken place in France just a few months earlier. Throughout all of his stages, the dandy was very much a product of his times, and if the Regency gave rise to his first incarnation, the political backdrop in France set the tone for a more overt democratization of dandyism, and opened the discourse to the broader political and sociological question of leisure time that would become an increasingly prominent topic over the coming decades.⁸ For Balzac’s conflation of dandy and artist echoes the one then taking place between the aristocracy and the middle class, the two of which, he here declares, shall “lead the people onto the path of civilization and light.”

July Revolution or not, this alignment was obviously not going to change much for “the people,” and Balzac’s obvious cynicism in this treatise leaves Carlyle’s Drudges little else to do but continue drudging along. But the “enlargened caste” ruling over them, Balzac’s conjoining of “natural-born” aristocratic elegance with the educated middle-class arts and sciences, echoes the paradoxical foundation to this treatise; for if, as Balzac declares, “elegance is less an art than a feeling,” if any man can get rich but must be “born elegant” to be elegant, then of what use is a handbook on the subject? The contradiction in the attempt to democratize a way of living that cannot be taught or studied is one that inevitably arises throughout much of the literature on dandyism.⁹ It is also what makes the French dandy such a complicated figure, a seamless mixture of reactionary conservatism and avant-garde revolution masked by an unnervingly calm exterior. This contradiction would find itself resolved only in practice: Barbey d’Aurevilly would embrace right-wing conservatism, whereas Baudelaire played a minor role in the 1848 Revolution. By the end of the century, a good portion of the Bohemian Parisian avant-garde would emerge from the shadows of dandyism and decadence to choose between the extremist paths of conservative proto-fascism and bomb-throwing anarchism.

Balzac maintains (perhaps masks) the paradox at the root of his subject with the folksy-scientific style of the physiology that was popular in his day, and one that he repeatedly employed—most fully in his Physiology of Marriage, but less blatantly throughout all of his novels. All physiologies of that time stemmed from the work of Johann Caspar Lavater, which in its broad strokes offered the sometimes troubling, and decidedly flawed, lesson that appearances were, in fact, everything.¹⁰ But Balzac’s more immediate mentor in the format was Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, whose 1825 Physiology of Taste injected a range of humor, anecdotes, and axioms into an extremely personalized and popularized version of the scientific framework. What Brillat-Savarin had done for gourmandism and gastronomy, Balzac had intended to do for nineteenth-century French society. His Human Comedy would go a long way in carrying out this project, although its 91 novels and short stories fell short of the 137 he had originally planned. An essential component to his project, however, was to be a series of analytical studies to be entitled Pathology of Social Life. Only the first part, The physiology of Marriage, was ever written, though, and it has long been available in English translation. Two of the others, the Anatomy of Educational Bodies and the Monograph on Virtue, were never written. The fourth, which he referred to variously as Complete Treatise on Exterior Life, On Elegant Living, or the Pathology of Social Life itself, was at least started. Though it had originally been written for the journal La Mode, it was his intention to incorporate the Treatise on Elegant Living into it, along with two other completed components, his Theory of Walking and Treatise on Modern Stimulants. A number of other short essays and sketches exist that may well have been intended for eventual inclusion in this project (titles include “Physiology of the Cigar,” “Gastronomic Physiology,” “Physiology of Clothing,” and “Study of Manners through Gloves”), but given Balzac’s voluminous output and lack of specific indications, only guesses can be made as to what would or would not have been incorporated.

It is obvious, given the outline Balzac sketched out at the end of chapter III, that the Treatise on Elegant Living was never finished. It is also likely that the later Theory of Walking grew out of the projected chapter on gait and deportment, but nothing exists of those chapters he announces on manners and conversation, nor of what was to be the intriguing contribution by Eugène Sue on impertinence. Be that as it may, Balzac did set enough down to allow us a clear understanding of the unified triad essential to any understanding and practice of elegant living: simplicity, cleanliness, and harmony. Whether taking it as an illuminating cornerstone to his Human Comedy, a crucial chapter in the history of dandyism, or as an entertaining handbook on the use and power derived from perfecting one’s outer appearance, the reader should find this short work amply rewarding.

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The translator would like to thank Judy Feldmann and Inez Hedges for helping to make this translation better than it would have been, and Emily Gutheinz for rendering it into such an elegant form. Any flaws to be found in this text may be ascribed to the translator.