Who's a Dandy? by George Walden and Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly

A pose by any other name

Dandyism: how good the word always looks on the page, suggestive of some champagne existence strung between Berkeley Square and Brighton Pavilion. Officially, it was invented by the English and could only have arisen in a society which had first produced the gentleman.

But it was the French, of course, who developed it into a philosophy: first Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly and later Charles Baudelaire. Here, George Walden translates the former's essay on Beau Brummel and prefaces it with a long introduction which attempts to broaden the concept with reference to Andy Warhol and Jarvis Cocker. But no clear thesis emerges. To this he appends Barbey's summary of the career of Lauzun, a dandy avant la lettre, who married a cousin of Louis XIV.

The result is confusing – Barbey himself is full of contradictions – and Walden might profitably have rendered it more confusing by including Baudelaire's essay, which says gloomy things like "Dandyism is the last gleam of heroism in times of decadence".

This was a rallying cry for poseurs in 19th-century Europe, but not remotely true. The dandy can appear anywhere at any time. He is an abiding type. But he flourishes best in light-hearted eras: the Regency, the 1890s, 1920s and 1960s.

It was Wilde, Beardsley and Beerbohm who brought back the dandy's crucial sense of mischief and fun which French pomposity had bled out. Barbey and Baudelaire also sought to castrate the dandy, whereas in my experience dandyism and sexual promiscuity go very easily together. The dandy can also be as fond of opium and cocaine as of champagne and snuff. The dandy is not a prude.

All of which is to say that this smart little book has set one thinking on a big subject. What seems to be struggling for expression behind these various documents, but never stated in any of them, is a simple, wonderful idea: the dandy is he who in his life seeks a fusion of art and society. From this, it follows that there are two broad streams of dandyism: the artistic (Byron, Diaghilev, Cocteau, the Sitwells) and the social (Brummel, d'Orsay, Harold Acton, Nicky Haslam).

What is so attractive,is that dandysim is bipolar. Artistic dandies always have intense social interests and social dandies artistic ones. A very few, by restricting their ambitions, straddle the divide. Max Beerbohm is the obvious example.

Though dandies are born, not made, all demonstrate a propensity for elevation. They form an aristocracy of the soul. Though effortlessness is the effect, it involves much hidden hard work because the dandy – unlike the fop (vanity), aesthete (withdrawal), or hedonist (self-indulgence) – has the finest of objectives: to create heaven on earth.