The Ideal of Gentlemanliness on BBC

[marcelo]

Dear All

Does anybody have the MP3-file containing a BBC documentary called "The Shadow of the Gentleman" (1 May 2006 20:00-20:30 / Radio 4 FM)? The link to the programme makes the following description:

"The gentleman is an iconic figure whose values many would like to revive. Chris Bowlby looks at what he really stood for, and whether we can reinvent the gent for a less formal, less inhibited age."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/pip/gjqwg/

I would thank for any piece of information on how to obtain the file.

Thanks in advance

M.

[Manself]

I don't I'm afraid, but I'd be absolutely intrigued to hear this programme. If I can find any trace of it I'll report back.

[storeynicholas]

Ditto.
NJS

[marcelo]

This was one of my first posts in the LL. I thought in the meantime a gentleman might have a clue as to where this BBC programme could be found.

[Manself]

I'm sorry to have taken so long to get back The Lounge on this thread. I have heard the programme (something that required me to make an appointment at the British Library) and it was very disappointing. The programme told one very little that isn't obvious, and spent far too long interviewing the organiser of an etiquette course in the UK that promises to train men to be better mannered so they can get ahead in the corporate world.

Clearly the idea that one behaves well just to get ahead in the corporate world is the antithesis of being a gentleman, but it is interesting to wonder what constitutes gentlemanly conduct in 2009. It's obvious that one needs to be kind, polite, well mannered and generous, but that doesn't make one a gentleman, that makes one a decent human being. It's also tempting to be distracted by superficial things like dress and sophistication - having a tailor and knowing in which direction to pass the port doesn't make a gentleman, and not having a tailor or not knowing about port doesn't disqualify someone. There was a long piece in The Times about modern gentlemen last year that made the above mistake, and I concluded from it that a necessary element to gentlemanliness is a private income. If you have to work for a living (unless you're very successful and self-employed) it's likely that you'll have to compromise your honour (an abstract concept these days, but an important part of gentlemanliness) in order to do your job. When I took up full-time employment last year, after a period of self-employment, I felt conscious - and sorry - that I could no longer realistically aspire to be a gentleman if I had follow the orders of others. I think that honour and independence are key to what it is to be a gentleman.

How would other members define a gentleman? NJS, I'm sure you've got something interesting to say on this subject, and might well set it in a historical context for us.

[NicolausN]

I'm sorry to have taken so long to get back The Lounge on this thread. I have heard the programme (something that required me to make an appointment at the British Library) and it was very disappointing. The programme told one very little that isn't obvious, and spent far too long interviewing the organiser of an etiquette course in the UK that promises to train men to be better mannered so they can get ahead in the corporate world.

Clearly the idea that one behaves well just to get ahead in the corporate world is the antithesis of being a gentleman, but it is interesting to wonder what constitutes gentlemanly conduct in 2009. It's obvious that one needs to be kind, polite, well mannered and generous, but that doesn't make one a gentleman, that makes one a decent human being. It's also tempting to be distracted by superficial things like dress and sophistication - having a tailor and knowing in which direction to pass the port doesn't make a gentleman, and not having a tailor or not knowing about port doesn't disqualify someone. There was a long piece in The Times about modern gentlemen last year that made the above mistake, and I concluded from it that a necessary element to gentlemanliness is a private income. If you have to work for a living (unless you're very successful and self-employed) it's likely that you'll have to compromise your honour (an abstract concept these days, but an important part of gentlemanliness) in order to do your job. When I took up full-time employment last year, after a period of self-employment, I felt conscious - and sorry - that I could no longer realistically aspire to be a gentleman if I had follow the orders of others. I think that honour and independence are key to what it is to be a gentleman.

How would other members define a gentleman? NJS, I'm sure you've got something interesting to say on this subject, and might well set it in a historical context for us.

Perhaps it's because I'm from the US or because have a background of Emily Post, but I always thought that the art of being a gentleman was the same as being a decent human being and showing those qualities through your forethought of and actions toward others. Being a gentleman has nothing to do with income, social strata at birth, etc. I'm quite disgusted by the idea that a so-called private income is required for gentleman status. Furthermore, one must still work to achieve such an income. Working to preserve one's capital base and subsequent income is still work like it or not.

I do agree that it is not gentlemanly to behave well just to get ahead in the corporate world. A gentleman constantly strives to behave well, not just when trying to advance his career.

[storeynicholas]

Manself - There's a burden to discharge! One definition of a gentleman is Cardinal Newman's saying that 'it is almost a definition of a gentleman that he is one who never intentionally inflicts pain'. But that definition might leave out active compassion and could be applied to a recluse on a far-flung island and is not a definition which is complete enough for those who live and act amongst others. The very closest that I have seen it defined is on plaque on a monument; the great granite monolith on Penleath Point over-looking Fowey in Cornwall, erected to the memory of Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch (1863-1944): academic, novelist, poet, educator and anthologist - whose great anthology The Oxford Book of English Verse is still a beacon among anthologies. The inscription, written by the then Bishop of Truro, ends with the words:

Courteous in manner; charitable in judgement;
Chivalrous in action,
He manifested, in life, as in literature,
The dignity of manhood, the sanctity of home,
And the sovereignty of God

Standing on that wonderful spot, above the harbour and the 'dearest of small cities' as he called it, it is difficult not to be affected by the impact that his life had on the many people who made that monument to him.
NJS

[marcelo]

I'm sorry to have taken so long to get back The Lounge on this thread. I have heard the programme (something that required me to make an appointment at the British Library) and it was very disappointing. The programme told one very little that isn't obvious, and spent far too long interviewing the organiser of an etiquette course in the UK that promises to train men to be better mannered so they can get ahead in the corporate world.

Clearly the idea that one behaves well just to get ahead in the corporate world is the antithesis of being a gentleman, but it is interesting to wonder what constitutes gentlemanly conduct in 2009. It's obvious that one needs to be kind, polite, well mannered and generous, but that doesn't make one a gentleman, that makes one a decent human being. It's also tempting to be distracted by superficial things like dress and sophistication - having a tailor and knowing in which direction to pass the port doesn't make a gentleman, and not having a tailor or not knowing about port doesn't disqualify someone. There was a long piece in The Times about modern gentlemen last year that made the above mistake, and I concluded from it that a necessary element to gentlemanliness is a private income. If you have to work for a living (unless you're very successful and self-employed) it's likely that you'll have to compromise your honour (an abstract concept these days, but an important part of gentlemanliness) in order to do your job. When I took up full-time employment last year, after a period of self-employment, I felt conscious - and sorry - that I could no longer realistically aspire to be a gentleman if I had follow the orders of others. I think that honour and independence are key to what it is to be a gentleman.

How would other members define a gentleman? NJS, I'm sure you've got something interesting to say on this subject, and might well set it in a historical context for us.

Thanks for the trouble to go as far as to make an appointment at the British Library in order to listen to the BBC program I had referred to. I am sorry the program was so disappointing after all. But, actually, most contemporary accounts of what being a gentleman amounts to do not really go much beyond the otherwise trivial references to manners, politeness, and understatement. In the worst cases these virtues are treated on an instrumental basis, as means to an end – as desirable qualities one should be in a position to produce in present-day job market. But what else, indeed, should one expect from a gentleman? Maybe the best treatments of the ideal of gentlemanliness are those to be found in the pre-war and inter-war literary works of such writers as Siegfried Sassoon (Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man), Anthony Powell (A Dance to the Music of Time), or Evelyn Waugh (almost everything). Whether to criticise, to revere, or to reinvent it, the ideal of gentlemanliness they had in mind went far beyond the platitude of manners, politeness, and understatement. Gentlemanliness was seen by them almost as kind of "second religion”. This expression is used, for instance, by Philip Mason in his book The English Gentleman: The Rise and Fall of an Ideal (1982). He makes the following statement:




I have been more interested in this kind of historical reconstruction of the ideal of Gentlemanliness, and I had thought the BBC program might have been a interesting contribution in this regard. But it seems it was not. The literature on this topic abounds, and Mason’s account is also sometimes criticised. Any thoughts?

[storeynicholas]

This is thought-provoking as there is an ostensible conflict between the austerity of a truly Christian life and that of an English gentleman - which is a type that may be traced back to Chaucer's Knight. For example, can one imagine Christ with a minute repeating Breguet watch or a Bristol Fighter T. Neither can one really imagine Christ turning the East India Company into the hub of an empire. However, an English gentleman might indulge in all of these things - indeed he would earn even the grudging admiration of the subjects of his empire. However, I think that we need to remember that the material side of the subject is wholly ancillary to the main object of life which is seen to be service: service to the state, service to one's fellow man and an acknowledgement of the force of the obligation in the expression noblesse oblige - carried even to the extent of self-sacrifice. Maybe the spirit of it is summed up very well in Sir Henry Newbolt's poem Vitae Lampada - which has been so often parodied that it is difficult not to smile in reading its intentionally roistering roll (see the end of this page): http://www.firstworldwar.com/poetsandprose/newbolt.htm

Perhaps it is more cogently described in Nelson's prayer before the Battle of Trafalgar:
http://www.hms-victory.com/index.php?op ... Itemid=152

and even in the signal that he sent to the whole fleet:
England expects that every man will do his duty.

Other examples of this abound on memorials across England, such as this one on a granite seat and horse trough in St Austell:
To the memory of Captain The Hon Thomas Charles Reginald Agar Robartes, Coldstream Guards, MP for the St Austell Division of Cornwall who lost his life in France September 30th 1915 after rescuing a wounded comrade under heavy fire for which exploit he was recommended for the Victoria Cross. Erected by members of the House of Lords and the House of Commons

He did not get the VC - maybe, because he had been given so much, it was felt that more was expected of him than of those in a lesser position - and he just had not failed. He was, incidentally, also said to have been the best-dressed man in Parliament in his time. His younger brother eventually inherited the viscountcy to which he had been the heir and neither the brother nor any of his siblings married - the whole family dying out in the 1960s and 1970s, as though they had seen the writing on the wall:


Thomas Agar Robartes.

NJS

[marcelo]

“Play up! Play up! And play the game!” The First WW was thought at its inception to be fought like a game. Yet, as the source which NJS adduces to Sir Henry Newbolt’s Vitae Lampada points out, the poet himself dismissed later his literary creation as a “kind of Frankenstein’s Monster”. A multitude of long established and cherished values was destroyed in the Flanders Fields. Thus, the generation who had been previously brought up in well-known public schools to behave like gentlemen, and play by the rules, became quite suspicious about the very ideals they were supposed to act upon.

What I personally find quite impressive in this regard is the way some literary works depict this conflict between the old ideals of gentlemanliness and the crude realities of twentieth century. And, interestingly, the conflicts at issue here also involve reflection on the import of some inherited sartorial values. At the outset of A Dance to the Music of Time (1951) Anthony Powell, for instance, refers to Kenneth Widmerpool, the main character of his novel, as someone who:

“…made himself already memorable as a new boy, by wearing the wrong kind of overcoat.” “Stories about it had grown into legend: so much so that even five or six year later you might still occasionally hear an obtrusive or inappropriate garment referred to as ‘a Widmerpool’; and Templer, for example, would sometimes say: ‘I am afraid I’m wearing rather Widmerpool’s socks today, or, ‘I’ve bought a wonderfully Widmerpool tie to go home in.’ My impression is that the overcoat's initial deviation was slight, depending on the existence or absence of a belt at the back, the fact that the coat was cut single- or double-breasted, or again, irregularity may have had to do with the collar; perhaps the cloth, even, was of the wrong colour or texture”.

Evelyn Waugh’s Decline and Fall (1928), in like fashion, begins with reference to a sartorial misdemeanour:

“Now it so happened that the tie of Paul [Pennyfeather]’s bore a marked resemblance to the pale of blue and white of the Bollinger Club. The difference of a quarter of an inch in the width of the stripes was not one that Lumsden of Stratdrummond was likely to appreciate.”
‘Here’s an awful man wearing the Boller tie’, said the Laird”

Yet, in spite of Widmerpool’ Paul Pennyfeather’s faux pas, it seems we are gradually conducted to regard these characters as the ‘real’ gentlemen of the story. In the course of twentieth century, the ideal of gentlemanliness had to be reinvented, but I wonder whether this project has ever been fully accomplished... Any comments?

[storeynicholas]

I am not sure that it was wholly reinvented; maybe it is a question of deciding the extent to which the practices and fine details of daily life were gradually jettisoned in the increasing pace of modern living and the extent to which the new environment (maybe too much enlightened - too complacent) after the Great War was determined to make fewer demands upon the noble impulse of self-sacrifice in the next generation - and, ironically, nearly left it open to annihilation as a result

However, there is this from W B Yeats:-

http://ireland.wlu.edu/landscape/Group1/poem.htm

In verse 6 of this poem,In Memory of Major Robert Gregory Yeats introduces him as 'our Sidney and our perfect man' - suggesting that, still mid-Great War, the ideal of the polymath Renaissance man prevailed - moreover, here Irishman Gregory had no real stake in the battle that killed him and in a line of the other poem about him - An Irish Airman Foresees His Death 'Those that I fight I do not hate; those that I guard I do not love.' The overall suggestion here is a complete disinterestedness - which in the self-sacrifice suggests an even greater nobility than that of the man with a stake in the outcome - even if it is just the preservation of a way of life. But the sense of the possibility of the ultimate need to risk or sacrifice one's life has to remain key to an understanding of this whole concept. Certainly, it has not fled - since there are many modern examples of the exhibition of great and selfless courage - those that come to me straight away are of Lisa Potts GM, the girl who defended, with her bare arms, the infants in her charge against a madman wielding a machete and the actions of Colonel H Jones VC and Sergeant Ian McKay VC in the Falklands Invasion: http://www.britains-smallwars.com/Falklands/vc.htm

I knew that Newbolt would raise a smile. Maybe, a better example is actually in a better poem by his contemporary Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, from his novel The Splendid Spur:

http://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-splendid-spur/

and note the beginning of the second verse insisting that outward things are 'measures not the springs of worth.'

NJS

[sartorius]

Yet, in spite of Widmerpool’ Paul Pennyfeather’s faux pas, it seems we are gradually conducted to regard these characters as the ‘real’ gentlemen of the story. In the course of twentieth century, the ideal of gentlemanliness had to be reinvented, but I wonder whether this project has ever been fully accomplished... Any comments?

To my mind the Widmerpool of Powell's novels is anything but a gentleman - he is a model of the mediocre achieving more than his abilities merit through a combination of vaulting ambition and unscrupulousness. Pennyfeather might have a better claim but his character is really just a fulcrum for the farce which drives the plot. A better example would be Guy Crouchback in Waugh's Sword of Honour trilogy, or Christopher Tietjens in Ford Maddox Ford's Parade's End.

[marcelo]

Dear Sartorius, Dear NJS
Thanks for the comments. True, maybe Nicholas Jenkins, the narrator of Powel’s novel, rather than Widmerpool, would fare as the gentleman of the story. Yet, there seems to be a degree of suspicion as to what count as a gentleman in most novels in the post-war years. Think for example of the very title of Evelyn Waugh’s novel Officers and Gentlemen. I think that there would be no doubt, previously to the First War, that officers are eo ipso gentlemen. But in this novel this equation does not obtain. A certain idea of gentlemanliness is preserved, but this idea seems to have changed, at least in part, the meaning it still had at the turn of the century.

[sartorius]

For an amusing charicature of what a genlteman is not, try A G MacDonell's The Autobiography of a Cad.

[carl browne]

Sometimes the simplest terms are the hardest to define.

I am reminded of the comment that US Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart made regarding obscenity:

"I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description; and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it . . . ."

The gentleman is not readily defined, but we know him when we see him, and there lies his appeal.

C