What constitutes elegant company in the 21st century?
Browsing through a Christie’s catalogue, I came across the description of a pen-and-wash drawing by Rowlandson, c. 1800, ‘Elegant company in a park’. It set me thinking. One knows very well what was meant by ‘elegant company’ at the beginning of the 19th century. It applied perfectly to the party Mr Bingley brings to the Merryton dance in Chapter Three of Pride and Prejudice. He himself is ‘good-looking and gentlemanlike’ with ‘easy, unaffected manners’ and £100,000. His two sisters each have £30,000 and ‘an air of decided fashion’, though one is married to a ‘Mr Hurst, [who] merely looked the gentleman’. But his mediocrity is more than compensated by Bingley’s friend Darcy, who is not just fine, tall and handsome but has ‘a noble mien’ and £10,000 a year. Altogether ‘elegant company’.
Jane Austen’s clarity on such a point is given added definition by her insistence on what constituted the reverse of elegance in the shape of Mrs Elton. She believes herself elegant but is in truth, as Emma angrily insists, ‘Insufferable, absolutely insufferable’. She calls her husband ‘Mr E’ and caro sposo’, the latter smart society usage briefly in the 1780s but now démodé. She was ‘A little upstart, vulgar being [with] airs of pert pretension and under-bred finery’. There was even something fishy about her fortune: ‘So many thousands as would always be called ten.’ Well! That put Augusta Elton (known to her friends at Maple Grove perhaps as ‘Gussie the Goer’) firmly in her place.
But now, 200 years later, we are not so sure. My eye fell on a huge photo in the Guardian of the annual Opera House ball in Vienna, one of the few occasions nowadays when white ties are de rigueur. Here, if anywhere, is modern elegance. Or is it? This crowded, heaving, sweaty mass of boiled-shirt herrs and overexposed fraus, craning their necks, thickset or scrawny according to sex, to spot the genuine celebs, does not strike one as elegant. Can it be that men do not know how to wear evening dress any more, being habituated to the slovenly dinner jacket, invented by Lord Dupplin not much more than a century ago?
As recently as the 1930s, men aspiring to elegance habitually ‘changed’ (i.e., put on white tie and tails) after dark, to dine out, to go to the theatre or a concert, or merely to spend the evening at home. There is a revealing photo, taken in New York, of first-class passengers climbing up the gangplank of a French-line ship in full evening dress. The reason was that, in those days, transatlantic liners eastbound sailed at midnight. The rich, leaving their valets and maids to look after the luggage, would arrive at ten, briefly visit their cabins to see all was well, and then promenade to the first-class dining-room. By the time they had disposed of their turtle soup, their oysters and caviar, and their Maine lobster thermidor, their superb art deco ship, be it the Normandie, the Rex, the Europa or the Queen Mary, had been tugged out from its midtown quay and was gliding into the open ocean, Manhattan’s lights winking on the port beam. A pleasing contrast to the horrors of JFK today, where elegance, or even mere serenity, is impossible.
The word ‘elegance’ itself ought to give a clue to what might constitute it today. It is a common error to believe that it has some connection with elegy. In fact, the latter poetic term comes from the Greek root for sorrow: it is mournful. By contrast, elegant comes from the Latin, eligere, to select, to choose carefully or skilfully, to make oneself as it were part of the elect or chosen few. Hence it had an important political future too, though no one, God knows, would term the present House of Commons elegant, or the Lords for that matter, though many of them, having bought their peerages, can’t be short of the cash to patronise Savile Row. The word came to us via the French élégant, probably brought over by Richard II in the late 14th century, at the time he was introducing us to those Parisian elegances the dining fork and the pocket handkerchief.
Elegant is one of those tricky words, like meticulous, which can be used in a critical sense, implying excessive and lacking in proportion. Etymologists say that was the original meaning of the Latin root, in the good, stern old days of the pristine Republic, when it was a term of reproach, meaning dainty, fastidious and foppish, particularly of dress and appearance. But in classical times, especially under the late Republic and Empire, it took on the meaning of refined luxury and graceful propriety. In 15th-century Middle English, it occasionally acquired odd overtones. Thus the OED gives a quote from the Digby Mysteries of 1485, the year the Tudors came in, that to have a close shave ‘makyt me llegant and lusty in lykying’. What exactly is he getting at?
In mediaeval and Renaissance times, elegant usually referred to dress and deport ment, but it sometimes kept its original sense of eligibility, meaning well chosen, hence useful or efficient. As often happened with words in the 17th century, it crossed the Atlantic with the Mayflower, and retained meanings long after they became obsolete in England. Thus, in the mid-19th century, it still made sense in Massachusetts to refer to an elegant tan-yard. If a man had an ‘elegant wife’, it might mean she was a good cook and housekeeper, as well as neat, and had been chosen with care.
Dr Johnson approved of elegance. To him it implied sound judgment, an exact marriage between means and ends, something ‘nice’, in the old sense. In his Lives of the Poets he contrasts elegant with ostentatious. The same distinction was made by Mrs Gaskell, or at least by the old ladies in Cranford where, she wrote, economy is always ‘elegant’ and spending ‘ostentatious’. Elegant was particularly applied to cooking, meals, eating, implying discernment and the reverse of gluttony. But, as with words like genteel and fastidious, a sardonic, critical undertone creeps in. We find Charles Lamb in an Elia essay writing snarkily of ‘palates not uninstructed in dialectical elegances’. As opposed to Johnsonian exactness, there was Chesterfieldian fussiness, the dancing-master touch. Wilkie Collins, in the Queen of Hearts (1874), describes a doctor who ‘felt languid pulses in elegant bedrooms’. Thomson, in The Seasons, has a straight-faced reference to ‘elegant sufficiency’, referring to income. By late Victorian times the phrase had become a joke, referring to eating and aimed at suburban gentility. I remember as a child in the 1930s hearing grown-ups refer to the nouveau-riche family in the neighbourhood who had taught their offspring, when asked by their hostess if they wanted more to eat, to say, ‘I have had an elegant sufficiency.’ Thus rambling in the highways and byways of lexicology, I have forgotten to get down to the real business of defining elegance now. I used to think that the two most elegant men I knew were Stephen Spender, especially after his attire was taken in hand by his generous son-in-law Barry Humphries, and the old Duke of Devonshire, an expert in the subtle use of yellow. Now they are dead, and I can think of no man I would term really elegant. In any case the word has changed. They say ‘cool’ instead. Darcy was cool at the Merryton dance, was he not? Positively standoffish. But, so far as I can see, today it is not cool to be elegant.
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