The Works of Max Beerbohm, Max Beerbohm [epub read online books .txt] 📗

all that concerns costume, and each morning come, themselves tentatively clad, to watch the perfect procedure of his toilet and learn invaluable lessons. I myself, a lie-a-bed, often steal out, foregoing the best hours of the day abed, that I may attend that levée. The rooms of the Master are in St. James’s Street, and perhaps it were well that I should give some little record of them and of the manner of their use. In the first room the Master sleeps. He is called by one of his valets, at seven o’clock, to the second room, where he bathes, is shampooed, is manicured and, at length, is enveloped in a dressing-gown of white wool. In the third room is his breakfast upon a little table and his letters and some newspapers. Leisurely he sips his chocolate, leisurely learns all that need be known. With a cigarette he allows his temper, as informed by the news and the weather and whatnot, to develop itself for the day. At length, his mood suggests, imperceptibly, what colour, what form of clothes he shall wear. He rings for his valet⁠—“I will wear such and such a coat, such and such a tie; my trousers shall be of this or that tone; this or that jewel shall be radiant in the folds of my tie.” It is generally near noon that he reaches the fourth room, the dressing-room. The uninitiate can hardly realise how impressive is the ceremonial there enacted. As I write, I can see, in memory, the whole scene⁠—the room, severely simple, with its lemon walls and deep wardrobes of white wood, the young fops, φιλομαθέστατοι τιυες τῶν νεανίσκων, ranged upon a long bench, rapt in wonder, and, in the middle, now sitting, now standing, negligently, before a long mirror, with a valet at either elbow, Mr. Le V., our cynosure. There is no haste, no faltering, when once the scheme of the day’s toilet has been set. It is a calm toilet. A flower does not grow more calmly.

Any of us, any day, may see the gracious figure of Mr. Le V., as he saunters down the slope of St. James’s. Long may the sun irradiate the surface of his tilted hat! It is comfortable to know that, though he die tomorrow, the world will not lack a most elaborate record of his foppery. All his life he has kept or, rather, the current valets have kept for him, a Journal de Toilette. Of this there are now fifty volumes, each covering the space of a year. Yes, fifty springs have filled his buttonhole with their violets; the snow of fifty winters has been less white than his linen; his boots have outshone fifty sequences of summer suns, and the colours of all those autumns have faded in the dry light of his apparel. The first page of each volume of the Journal de Toilette bears the signature of Mr. Le V. and of his two valets. Of the other pages each is given up, as in other diaries, to one day of the year. In ruled spaces are recorded there the cut and texture of the suit, the colour of the tie, the form of jewellery that was worn on the day the page records. No detail is omitted and a separate space is set aside for “Remarks.” I remember that I once asked Mr. Le V., half in jest, what he should wear on the Judgment Day. Seriously, and (I fancied) with a note of pathos in his voice, he said to me, “Young man, you ask me to lay bare my soul to you. If I had been a saint I should certainly wear a light suit, with a white waistcoat and a flower, but I am no saint, sir, no saint.⁠ ⁠… I shall probably wear black trousers or trousers of some very dark blue, and a frock-coat, tightly buttoned.” Poor old Mr. Le V.! I think he need not fear. If there be a heaven for the soul, there must be other heavens also, where the intellect and the body shall be consummate. In both these heavens Mr. Le V. will have his hierarchy. Of a life like his there can be no conclusion, really. Did not even Matthew Arnold admit that conduct of a cane is three-fourths of life?

Certainly Mr. Le V. is a great artist, and his supremacy is in the tact with which he suits his toilet to his temperament. But the marvellous affinity of a dandy’s mood to his daily toilet is not merely that it finds therein its perfect echo nor that it may even be, in reflex, thereby accentuated or made less poignant. For some years I had felt convinced that in a perfect dandy this affinity must reach a point, when the costume itself, planned with the finest sensibility, would change with the emotional changes of its wearer, automatically. But I felt that here was one of those boundaries, where the fields of art align with the fields of science, and I hardly dared to venture further. Moreover, the theory was not easy to verify. I knew that, except in some great emotional crisis, the costume could not palpably change its aspect. Here was an impasse; for the perfect dandy⁠—the Brummell, the Mr. Le V.⁠—cannot afford to indulge in any great emotion outside his art; like Balzac, he has not time. The gods were good to me, however. One morning near the end of last July, they decreed that I should pass through Half Moon Street and meet there a friend who should ask me to go with him to his club and watch for the results of the racing at Goodwood. This club includes hardly any member who is not a devotee of the Turf, so that, when we entered it, the cloakroom displayed long rows of unburdened pegs⁠—save where one hat shone. None but that illustrious dandy, Lord X., wears quite so broad