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Gentleman Officer

newcriterion.com

> One of the characteristics for which the English gentleman is famed is his self-deprecation. He is trained in understatement in all things; he has litotes coursing through his veins. The height of vulgarity is to draw attention to oneself, and the more remarkable any of his achievements, the less attention he should draw to them.

What happened that we've lost this today?

I feel the 'English gentleman', with its self-deprecation, humility, self-sacrifice and honor, is something we need more of today. I'm not sure how we lost it. In the UK, perhaps something to do with social change in Britain post-war, but what about similar personal codes in America?

I think that there used to be a possibility that if you played the game, kept your end up and looked after your mates you'd be seen right. Some people still try and make that happen, but we all have to understand and acknowledge that no matter how hard we work, how well we do, how decently we act, at any moment our peers, organisations and country may turn on us and render us into destitution and disgrace.

So we have to bleat on about how valuable we are so that we have some idea that our families are not going to have to sleep in the street.

Historical period dramas and suchlike often focus on the nobility who made up the richest 0.1% of the population.

Perhaps we have as many Oxford-educated Old Etonians who inherited a baronetcy today as we ever did, just we're not viewing the present through the camera that focuses on them in particular?

> In the UK, perhaps something to do with social change in Britain post-war, but what about similar personal codes in America?

They only work so long as they are widely understood. Take the humility common to a Midwesterner and put them somewhere like California or NYC, and they'll be very confused by why everyone appears to be constantly bragging.

>The cult of the amateur first of all built Britain’s empire, and then managed, by its casualness and determination to avoid confrontation and unpleasantness, to lose it.

Well, that would be one way of putting it. If one is a fan of utter bullshit.

For a less varnished take than this article on the attitudes and motivations of Britain's supposed gentlemen of that era, it is a very good idea to read Lawrence's 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom'. It pulls very few punches.

I know that the English gentleman is famed for self-deprecation: very many English gentlemen have explained this in print, at length. (No doubt they'd be happy do so face-to-face, but I've managed to avoid that.)

"“Brother,” cried Bath, “I own it was wrong, and I ask the doctor’s pardon: I know not how it happened to arise; for you know, brother, I am not used to talk of these matters. They are generally poltroons that do. I think I need not be beholden to my tongue to declare I am none. I have shown myself in a line of battle. I believe there is no man will deny that; I believe I may say no man dares deny that I have done my duty.”

The colonel was thus proceeding to prove that his prowess was neither the subject of his discourse nor the object of his vanity, when a servant entered and summoned the company to tea with the ladies; a summons which Colonel James instantly obeyed, and was followed by all the rest."

Henry Fielding, Amelia.

Good to see the ref to Waugh's Sword of Honour, a must read for anyone interested in the topics raised in Heffer's review of Verney.

These ideals died with the millions of men killed in the first and second world wars. The decades after the wars could be described as the rise and triumph of sentimentality as the chief characteristic of our culture.

If you read writers like Waugh's trilogy, but also Maughm's Ashenden stories that pre-date Fleming's Bond by some 25 years, the wryness of the "gentleman," was a self possession and self consciousness that reflected a genuine humility, usually based on some religious understanding. A variation on it appears in the original secret identity/super hero story, The Scarlett Pimpernell, where his external ridiculousness also hides an underlying steel.

What made a "gentleman," was the choice to be one. He was necessarily accomplished and formidable at something first, capable of violence or some kind of power, but chose not to use it. Simply being mannered without the underlying steel, was called being a fop, dandy, flaneur, boulevardier, dude, etc.

The reason we don't value gentlemen today is because the necessary underlying competence, skill, and experience itself is humiliating to men who are largely elevated for their capacity for compliance.

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