BOOKS
Victorians in armour
Harold Acton
The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman Mark Girouard (Yale University Press pp.312, £12.50) At a first glance I imagined that this handsome volume was intended as a prize for bright schoolboys, but after reading it I changed my mind. Although his history of the revival of the mediaeval code of chivalry contains many edifying episodes, Mr Girouard concludes that chivalry expired during the First World War. This I strenuously deny. At the risk of being dubbed a racist, at the age of 77 I still believe firmly in the native chivalry of AngloSaxons in general and the Second World War provides countless examples of this in every walk of life. If he be confronted with future calamities, I feel certain that the Anglo-Saxon will react with the same chivalry as his ancestors. The revival of the mediaeval code during the 19th century promoted this ideal of conduct and Mr Girouard offers an excellent case for it.
His introductory chapter opens with the synopsis of a play for children which rivalled Peter Pan in popularity between 1912 and 1950, Where the Rainbow Ends. St George appears in person to guide and protect two children on a voyage to their shipwrecked parents in the Land where the Rainbow Ends. Though the dialogue as quoted may seem absurd it is no more absurd than such plays produced on television today and it has the merit — for surely it is a merit — of being patriotic. The play ends with the audience and cast singing the National Anthem together. How I wish I had been there. I'd have joined the chorus with gusto. Do I detect a note of sophisticated mockery in this passage? It is curiously juxtaposed with evocations of Captain Scott's heroic expedition to the South Pole and the sinking of the Titanic, when the passengers and crew behaved with Spartan courage during the two hours and 40 minutes of going, going, till the band (which had been playing rag-time), played 'Nearer, my God, to Thee'. In the same year, of 1912, a spectacular tournament took place in the Empress Hall at Earl's Court to celebrate the tri-centenary 'Shakespeare's England', and it is pleasant to read that Lady Diana Manners graced the performance among the ladies attendant on the Queen of Beauty, Viscountess Curzon. Subsequent chapters offer an erudite survey of the revival and its influence on architecture, poetry, fiction, politics, and the figurative arts, throughout the 19th century and well into our own. 'Less obvious, but of equal if not greater interest,' Mr Girouard writes, 'is the part which the revival of chivalry played in creating ideals of behaviour by which all gentlemen were influenced, even if they did not consciously realise it.'
The book is copiously illustrated, but Mr Girouard warns us that it is not an arthistorical or literary study, so that the pictures only help us to visualise the castles and characters mentioned in the text. As art, the less said about them the better. Apart from the Pre-Raphaelites, the painters selected for illustration are of a uniform mediocrity. Watts and Millais were always overpraised — that insipid Sir Galahad for instance of which Watts wrote to the Eton master Mr Luxmoore: 'I think it may be of use as a peg whereon to hang an occasional little discourse . . . upon the dignity and beauty of purity and chivalry, which things should be the characteristic of the gentleman, probably with more effect and brought more home to the minds of the youth... than by cut and dried lectures.' Millais' Sir Isumbras at the Ford is simply grotesque; and what can one say of Sir Joseph Noel Paton's The Choice? Mr Girouard politely leaves its description to the Art Journal of 1895: 'A Knight completely armed in mail stands upon the verge of a precipice, grasping with his right hand the hand of an angel, while with his left he rejects the advances of a Circean temptress — a luridly beautiful, bold and attractive woman, arranged in luxurious deshabille.' The Prince Consort as an art connoisseur goes down in my estimation for patronising this abominable painter. E. H. Corbould, 'the official depicter of chivalry to royalty', was hardly an improvement on Paton. Rossetti and Burne-Jones specialised in Circean temptresses, as did Swinburne in poetry, but their concern with chivalry was peripheral.
Mr Girouard's plodding narrative is occasionally enlivened by accounts of such fascinating events as the Eglinton Tournament of 1839 which was held at Eglinton Castle in Ayrshire, about 20 miles from Glasgow — all but ruined by a torrential downpour of rain. But tournaments are not dead yet for I hear that they still take plac at Lewes in Sussex.
Exceptional patience must have been required for the author to wade through Sir Kenelm Digby's Broad Stone of Honour, sub-titled 'Rules for the Gentlemen of England', expanded in four volumes as 'The True Sense and Practice of Chivalry.' Digby 'brought chivalry up to date as a code of behaviour for all men, not just for soldiers; he enabled modern gentlemen who had never been near a battlefield to think of themselves as knights.' Mr Girouard is bound to confess that 'a modern reader working through the Broad Stone may sometimes feel as though he is pulling out pieces of innumerable spaghetti,' which is rather unfair to spaghetti. Julius Hare called it 'that volume which, had I a son, I would place in his hands, charging him, though such prompting would be needless, to love it next to his Bible.' Mr Girouard extracts the essence of this masterpiece and he informs us that Digby 'had a claim to be considered to be the founding father of the cold bath and cold dip, so enthusiastically advocated by Victorian gentlemen and schoolmasters.' Carlyle and Charles Kinglsey popularised Digby's ideas, and Kingsley, the Christian Socialist, 'spread the knowledge and fostered the love of a muscular Christianity.'
I had hoped to see the last of Kinglsey's fictional progeny on leaving my private school but here they are again, the hoariest of them fished out of dusty shelves to illustrate the chivalric theme: Tom Brown's Schooldays and its sequel; John Halifax, Gentleman; and The Heir of Redclyffe by Charlotte M. Yonge, the precursor of Marie CoreIli and Ethel M. Dell, ('his heavy moustache fell over his lip in a black cascade' etc, 'a giant in size and strength but lean in the flanks as a wolf-hound').
Instead of promoting peace on earth, the rector of Eversley painted after any kind of warfare as a 'chance for the nation to prove its manliness'. Eversley was conveniently near Aldershot where he often dined at the officers' mess. 'I like to have men of war about me,' he said. Even Tennyson caught the virus, and the Crimean War was a source of fresh inspiration after his intense affair with the Arthurian cycle and his embarrassment over Guenevere. 'Toughness of muscle, but much more toughness of heart,' was one of Carlyle's maxims, and Carlyle was the outstanding prophet of the period. It was his unfortunate wife who bore the brunt of his concept of purity, the thin crust that covered 'the burning lava'. Small wonder that he suffered from permanent indigestion.
Mr Girouard's thirteenth chapter, 'Modern Courtly Love', is perhaps the most absorbing, for here we are introduced to the full-blooded figure of Wilfred Scawen Blunt and 'the Souls', a chapter full of comic fantasy. Knight-errant though he was, Blunt was no paladin of purity, and for him `the chase was more important than the kill.' Apropos his visit to the Bedouins of Algeria in 1874 Mr Girouard pertinently observes: 'Knights-errant tended to be drawn to Arab countries, or to countries relatively untouched by Western civilisation, partly because they could get away on their own there, partly because they found such traditional ways of life preferable (in short spells, at any rate) to modern civilisation.' This is still only too true. Many such keen observations are embedded in the core of The Return to Camelot, which many will read with pleasure and instruction. However, the elegy on chivalry in the last chapter strikes me as somewhat premature, though fighting may no longer be 'one of the most honourable words in the vocabulary.' Protracted trench warfare was hideous enough, but since the development of nuclear arms the mass destruction of human life must have lost its attraction for `chivalrous' warmongers.
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