The Ceremony of Being a Gentleman
Tim English are still a good-tempered race, and they do not mind being abused by foreigners. They feel that a foreigner must cheer himself up somehow, considering what he is and where he comes from, and they regard his abuse as involuntary flattery. " Our two good friends, Fritz and 'Ans, will now oblige with the 'Im of 'Ate," said the sergeant-major at the classical concert party ; and a couple of German prisoners, trembling with terror, were duly, led on to the platform and forced to perform before our troops, who roared with delight, joined in the chorus, and loaded them with chocolates and cigarettes. English humour ! So exquisite if one happens to be English ! But if one isn't, if one is Fritz or Hans or Dr. Renier even, then one may feel that there is something rather uncanny in this armour of constant laughter, something almost perverse. Being English, I have written " alinost perverse." Dr. Renier would write " perverse." " You may fight such a people. You may trade with them. But whit an undertaking to try :and live among them !"
He himself is from Holland. He is a historian and journalist who has lived for seventeen years in this country and seen a good deal of middle-class society and a little of the working class. " With a continental Shrug of the shoulders, I hold up my distorted mirror to Narcissus," he says, and many surprising facts are reflected in these pages. He has written an ;excellent book, acute and witty, yet one hesitates to smother it with .. the usual reviewer's sweet:sauce, for the reason that it contains something besides wit and acuteness ; there is an astringent quality in it, and no one who reads it Carefully will be left with a very pleasant taste afterwards in his or her mouth. He is not anti-English—far from it and if he were we should ignore him. But he does not 'chaff us agreeably, like M. Andre Afaurois and others of the debonnaire school. He finds us just a little inhuman, just slightly unpleasing, and to be thought slightly anything is always galling : one's armour gets pierced at last. If Fritz and Hans had been more moderate in their blame, they would have received fewer cigarettes. It is so jolly to be hated out and out. It makes one feel all of.a piece.
Dr. Renier's dissection takes two forms. First, drawing on his personal impressions, he analyses in turn our self- complacency, our altruism, our sense of humour, our charm, our readiness to give money, our " sexual repression with its attendant disorders of pruriency and animal worship," &c. These qualities compose between them what he calls the " ritualistic conception of life," which is the conception held by the average public school man to-day. He then attempts a second analysis, by means of history. He observes that during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and as late as the reign of George IV, another and a more spon- taneous attitude to life prevailed. How and when did the change to " ritualism " occur ? He goes into the problem, and, in his closing chapter, suggests that the change is only temporary, and that the English are about to become human again, whether they like it or not. .
By our " ritualistic conception of life" he means what shallower observers have called our hypocrisy. He finds that between a stimulus and an Englishman's reaction to it a hidden process takes place, " which makes the resulting response differ from what an unprepared foreign student would expect it to be," so that we are always saying and doing things not because they have any meaning, but because they are supposed to be " right." " How do you do ? " says Mr. .A., on being introduced, but Mr, B. must not reply, " Quite well, thank you," or, " My asthma has been a little tiresome." He, too, must say, " How do you do ? " And this small social formula has its parallels in the wider spheres of conduct and action, indeed, all through the English universe. There is a ritual, often cheerful (one may even make jokes en a cricket field), but always obligatory and usually meaningless, and it is a ritual peculiar to the upper middle classes of England ; neither the Irish, the Scots, the Welsh, the colonials, nor the wage-earning classes have adopted it; it is the endless ceremony of being a gentleman.
Now the gentleman, Dr. Renier argues, came in when the aristocrat went out. If we are to give him a date, it is 1832, the year of the Reform Bill. The traditional rulers of England were then in a state of panic. They saw their privileges usurped by an unknown class who turned out to be grocers and bankers, but who seemed at the time far more terrifying than the Clydesiders of to-day. In their despair they turned to education. Would it not be possible to pare the claWs off these monsters while one was teaching them to wash their
hands ? And the monsters, equally terrified, agreed ; would it not be possible for them, once their hands were washed, to
say " How do you do ? " to the aristocracy ? The compact was struck-unconsciously on both sides, but none the less firmly, and out of it was developed the public school system as we know it to-day. At first that system represented the homage paid by virtue to vice. Then Arnold of Rugby appeared, and vice paid homage to virtue. Dr. Renier gives an interesting and sympathetic aechuat of Arnold, --as o f another great Victorian schoolmaster, Edward Bowen of Harrow. Arnold tried to make his boys Christian, manly, and enlightened, although by his own showing he -could- not, since he held the nature of a boy to be fundamentally evil.
What he could do was to give them an " officer " outlook, and instil in them respect for qualities they could never possess. He succeeded in doing that, and it- has become " ritual; -- and still &initiates England. "Boni -of a • politield crisis, it has evolved into a moral code. But it has no natural roots -in -our charicter, and the Gentleman will scarcely cele- brate his centenary. What with the 'rise of women; WM/ with the rise of the non-English English-speaking races,- what with the Zeit-Geist, -and (I would-add) what with our ap- proaching national poverty, the queer interlude cannot continue. The worried,- inhibited gentleman about to- pass away and Dr. Renier does not regret him, or see any reason
why self-restraint should disappear when self-repression goes. Such is his main argument, and a brief analysis of his concluding chapters, The earlier chapters are the more amusing, and I particularly commend them-to men who pride themselves on - their - sense of humour and to women • who prefer animals to men. The chief defect of the book is an infelicity of style which occasionally obliges a reader to go through a sentence twice before he can be sure whether it is
meant literally or sarcastically. And though Dr. Renier's knowledge of our idiom is good, it is not quite perfect ; " I
fear we have no telephone " does not mean " I think we have no telephone " so much as " I am sorry we have none." But these are incidental drawbacks, and anyone who is interested in a first-hand account of our national character will ignore them. At times the writing is full of charm and insight.
Listen to him on the subject of conversation. It might be assumed (he says) that English talk is boring ; well, like most assumptions about the English, this is wrong :
" The Englishman is a being of delicate shades and distinctions. Behind his serene face and reserved manner he hides the reactions of an appreciative mind. He may not utter them directly, but he loves to pour himself out by iinplication. Oh the strange charm of two English people seeking one another, and finding one another through the barrier of conventional talk! No brutal searchlight, as between continentals, to set out the other person in clear-cut outline. There is a pleasant game without set rules, thoughts are thrown out that dance like fairies on the thrilling air of a hot summer's noon, meeting and joining hands for a dance that defies 'the laws of gravity. An allusion to a half-forgotten admission, a hint that is throWn out, caught up without seeming effort, memories that rustle, dull chords that faintly vibrate. Echoes re-echo, minds open and admit a new notion which is silently stored up. It is the greatest and finest game the English play—and do they even know that it exists ?" . - For the ritualistic conception of life does not, in his opinion, make us either dolts, knaves or fools. But it does make us contorted and uncanny, particularly. as regards sex, and be would like us better, and thinks we should like one another
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