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