click, click, click of that bit of crabtree or malacca there is something which introduces into your formless slouch the tension of art, time in ordered intervals, the sweep and seduction of rhythm. Yes, that, perhaps; but morality, too, in a meticulous solicitude about canes and cravats?
The reviver of "elegance" replies:
Oh, to be sure, the existence of God and the frontiers of Poland have importance of another order. We might walk the earth, clad in sackcloth and girdled with a rope. But if man is the only clothes-wearing animal, elegance of costume is commendable. It is moral. It is one of the means of maintaining one's dignity as a civilized white man. So long as a man clings to his clothes he preserves a barrier between himself and barbarism. Let us guard what guards us.
"There are no questions but social questions." It is an utterance of Gambetta's, applauded many years ago by Mr. Brownell, the critic among us who looks most searchingly into every question that he considers. Following this hint, I have been sketching the general social considerations which, I conceive, may have stimulated Mr. Brownell to compose his latest and timely book[1]—a book savory with wit, of remorseless penetration, packed with wisdom and informed throughout by that nobility of feeling which is quite the rarest note in contemporary literature. In some respects "The Genius of Style" is Mr. Brownell's most beautiful book—high praise, because each of its major predecessors has been quite the best thing of its kind hitherto produced in America.
- ↑ The Genius of Style, New York, 1924.
