English Gentleman - Rise and Fall of Ideal

242 Pages·1982·49.495 MB·English

by  Philip Mason

Mason
FPT ISBN O-bflfi-OmOO-3 >$lfl.00
THE
ENGLISH
GENTLEMAN
In 1914 there were bitter controversies
raging in Britain and the gulf between the
rich and poor was dangerously wide, yet
the country showed at the outbreak of the
Great War that remained capable of
it
achieving an unshakable unity of purpose.
One of the reasons for this was the
astonishing degree to which its people
accepted inequality as inevitable and
admired those who ruled them. The
members of this ruling class would all have
described themselves as “gentlemen”. The
desire to be “a gentleman” runs through
English history from the time of Chaucer
into the twentieth century, and the word
could not have been so potent for so long if
it had not stood for a widely admired ideal
of conduct.
What, then, were the origins of this ideal,
this code, this club with a restricted
membership and a wide acceptance? Philip
Mason traces its development from its
embodiment in Chaucer’s “very parfit
gentle knight” to the nineteenth century,
when became an extraordinary web of
it
interconnecting, sometimes contradictory
strands. He shows how the sporting
gentleman is distinct from the gentleman-
scholar, and the Christian gentleman from
the officer and gentleman; how a man may
be an aristocrat and no gentleman, or
humbly born and one of nature’s
gentlemen and so on. Even in our own
;
egalitarian times the concept survives, as
his epilogue makes clear.
There is hardly a book in English
literature or a character in English history
who has not had something to say,
somewhere, about the subject. Using a
wealth of fascinating examples from both
sources, Philip Mason leaves us in no doubt
continued on backflap
: ::: :
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
As Philip Woodruff The Birth ofa Dilemma
The Conquest andSettlement
NOVELS
ofRhodesia
Call the Next Witness
Tear ofDecision
The WildSweet Witch
Rhodesia and Nyasaland ig6o
The Island ofChamba
Common Sense about Race
SHORT STORIES Prospero’s Magic
Whatever Dies Thoughts on Class and Race
Patterns ofDominance
FOR CHILDREN
Race Relations
The SwordofNorthumbria
Man, Race andDarwin (editor)
Hernshaw Castle
India and Ceylon
HISTORICAL NOVEL Unity andDiversity (editor)
Colonel ofDragoons
HISTORY
HISTORY A Matter ofHonour:
The Men Who Ruled India An Account ofthe Indian Army
Volume The Founders
i
BIOGRAPHY
Volume 2 The Guardians
Kipling : The Glass, the Shadow
and the Fire
RELIGION
The Dove in Harness
As Philip Mason AUTOBIOGRAPHY
A
ABOUT RACE Shaft ofSunlight
An Essay on Racial Tension HISTORICAL NOVEL
Christianity and Race Skinner ofSkinner’s Horse
THE
ENGLISH
GENTLEMAN
The Rise and Fall of an Ideal
Mason
Philip
William Morrow and Company, Inc
New
York
1982
\
'
©
Text copyright 1982 Philip Mason
©
Design copyright 1982 Shuckburgh Reynolds Limited
First published in Great Britain in 1982
by Andre Deutsch Limited
105 Great Russell Street,
London wcib
3LJ
First published in the LISA in 1982 by
William Morrow and Company, Inc.
105 Madison Avenue, New York, New York 10016
Produced, edited and designed by
Shuckburgh Reynolds Limited
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Designer: Tim Higgins
Picture research: Anne-Marie Ehrlich
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Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 82-47651
isbn: 0-688-01400-3
Typesetting by SX Composing Limited, Rayleigh, Essex
Printed and bound in Spain by Printer Industria Grafica, Barcelona
DLB 5078-1982 '
First Edition
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Mark
For and
Verity
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments 8
Introduction
9
Behaving Like a Gentleman
1 15
2 The Heritage of the Past 21
The Gentleman Chaucer
in
3 34
The Courtier
4 50
Court and Country
5 61
6 Elegance and Principle
70
The Gentleman as Sportsman 81
7
Newcome
8 Colonel 106
The Voice of the Mob
9 1 19
A
10 Romantic Realist
13i
Almost a Religion
1 1 144
12 Factories for Gentlemen 161
Evan Harrington
13 i75
Christian and Gentleman
14 181
15 Through Polish Eyes 188
16 The Edwardians 196
Over Half the Globe
1 7 207
A
18 High Ideal 217
The Gentleman Today
Epilogue:
19 227
Notes on Books
233
Index
237
: i
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Numerals refer to page numbers (abbreviations: l: left; r: right; t: top; b: bottom).
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for illustrations reproduced in
book
this
Arthur Ackermann & Son 56-7 London Library/Eileen Tweedy 75L,
1
BBC
Hulton Picture Library 151, 167, 75R, 78L, 78R, 79, 100, 101, 102, 103L,
171T, 171B, 183, 186, 198,200,208, 103R, 123, 126, 129, 133, 134, 138,
2 11,21 2T, 213T, 214, 220 139, 1 41, 146, 164L, 164R, 165T, 165B,
Bibliotheque Nationale, Paris 41 166, 176, 179TL, 179TR, 179B
British Library/Rav Gardner 24, 3 it, Mander and Mitcheson 202L
32, 42, 43BL, 51BL, 51BR, 72TL, 72TR, Mansell Collection 23, 31B, 53, 63, 65R,
72B, 73, 107, IO9, I I IL, I I IR, I I2L, 86, 89T, 93, 94, 97, 150, 153T, 153B,
I I 2R, I 13, I73, 202R I54T 1 54B ! 55T i 55B 168, 172T,
? »
British Museum 89B r 72B, I97, I99B, 204, 205, 209T, 209B,
Cavalry Club 160 2 3B, 2 5, backjacket
i
Constable & Co 30TL, 30TR, 30B National Gallery, London 28
E.T.Archive 43BR, 44, 47T, 47B, 149, National Portrait Gallery 58TL, 58TR,
2 I 2B 58B, 158
E.T.Archive/Tate Gallery 46 Salvation Army 199T
E.T.Archive/Eton College 159 Sotheby’s Belgravia 48
Eton College 156 Sothebv Parke Bernet 65L
Giraudon 43T, 51T Tate Gallery frontjacket
Robert Harding/British Library 45 Victoria and Albert Museum 66, 68, 95
INTRODUCTION
In the years between the death of Queen Victoria and the outbreak ofwar
in 1914, England seemed to most foreign observers hopelessly divided and to
some on the brink of revolution. There was extreme wealth and luxury on
the one hand and widespread poverty on the other; Ireland was on the point
ofcivil war; strikes were upsetting the daily life of the comfortable and filling
the newspapers. There was bitter controversy about votes for women and
militant suffragettes; about the future of the House of Lords; about death
duties designed to end the hereditary ownership of land.
But in August 1914 domestic quarrels disappeared and the nation was
united as never before. Why was this? No doubt there were many reasons but
one was the surprising degree to which the English people still accepted
inequality as a necessary part of life and on the whole admired those who
ruled them. England was still an oligarchy and most ofthe ruling class would
have been described as “gentlemen'’. What was meant by this word is not at
all easy to explain. It had different meanings in different mouths and the
same person would use it in different senses. But it did stand for an ideal of
conduct that was widely admired and this was one of the ties that unified the
nation.
One reason why the idea of the gentleman was so widely accepted was
that no one was quite sure who was a gentleman and who was not. There was
no closed caste and a great many people used the term in such a way that it
did not exclude themselves — or at least what they hoped their sons might
become. There was thus a wide range of professional people and ofthose who
would now be called white collar workers who identified themselves with the
upper classes in the sense that they hoped to join their ranks. The typical
middle-class Englishman was a snob; he loved a lord. He did not think he
could become a lord but he did think his son might become a gentleman. He
would very likely have put himself in a slightly higher social bracket than a
detached observer might have thought fitting and for that reason he felt he
was on the same side as the ruling classes. But there was also something quite
INTRODUCTION
10
different, a vast body of costermongers, jockeys, soldiers, flower-girls, news-
paper boys, domestic servants, with no thought of rising in the world them-
selves, who admired the qualities they believed gentlemen possessed.
According to Marx, they ought to have been full ofrancour and immersed in
the class war, but a great many of them were not. They cheered whenever
they saw the Earl of Lonsdale, the embodiment of ostentatious unearned
wealth.
At the beginning of this century, then, the concept of the gentleman was
an element in the unity ofthe nation. This was partly because ofits vagueness
and ambiguity, but partly also because in the reign of Queen Victoria there
had been an ideal of conduct which was generally thought to be proper for a
gentleman, and which really was in many ways admirable.
fhe purpose of this book is to consider the various meanings people have
attached to this word at different periods, and to observe some of the effects
it has had on their behaviour. It is therefore less what the gentleman actually
did than what it was thought proper for him to do that concerns me and it is
more from literature than from life that I shall draw examples.
•Since at least the time of Chaucer, there has been a distinction between
the social meaning of the word and the moral; social rank and the behaviour
proper to that rank don’t always coincide, and no one was more aware of
this than Chaucer. But his characters were not always so clear in their minds
as he was. It is from this confusion that there arises a subtle counterpoint
between what is thought proper and what actually happens that is the
essence of comedy.
There is nothing simple about this interplay of meanings and relationships
and it is further complicated by taking place against the backcloth of a
paradox that at first sight is rather surprising. Until the French Revolution,
English people took it for granted that social inequality was a fact of life, but
in practice they often behaved as though all men were sons of Adam. After
the French Revolution - when a nation founded on sharp social distinction
proclaimed equality as its motto - the reverse was the case; the English upper
classes became more and more uneasily aware that they were only human
but in practice more and more inclined to behave as though the lower classes
were not.
I first became aware of this paradox some years ago when I was trying to
get the feeling oflife in the reign ofQueen Anne. I spent some time reading a
collection of popular songs called: D’Urj'efs Pills to Purge Melancholy. Among
these were some verses about a young man in love with a girl he called
Aminta. One night at an inn he slept in the next bedroom to Aminta and her
maid Molly; the partition was thin and he could hear all that they said.
Aminta and Molly were sharing the same bed and they argued about who
should first use the chamber-pot. It is a trivial song, its coarseness unre-
deemed by wit, but it stuck in my memory because it suggested a society so