Notebook
Ihave warm memories of Claus von I3ulow who was a friend of mine up at Cambridge just after the war. He gave ex- cellent parties, at which there were brilliant- IY clever undergraduates like Colin Welch and Wayland Young, as well as all the more social figures like Father Gilbey, the Catholic chaplain. Later Claus moved to a luxurious flat in Belgrave Square which he shared with his mother. We used to ask him what his mother made of all the whips and other instruments of chastisement which were hanging on his walls as ornaments, making a great joke of his eccentric taste in interior decoration. At the time it seemed very funny and sophisticated to have a sadistic friend — shades of Evelyn Waugh's lfde Bodies or Aldous Huxley's Antic Hay. Still later, in the same flat, I remember his Wedding party when I first met Sunny, ;hen, as now, sadly comatose. She was languidly leaning up against the wall on which the instruments of torture hung apparently accepting them as quite normal, as had the mother — looking like a figure out of Charles Addams or Edgar Allan Poe, or so we all thought, much relishing the macabre comparison. In those days all this was very much the stuff of social com- edy. Claus made a joke of it. So did his friends. Good old Claus. How easy it is, When young, to find everything funny. Life seemed a marvellous playground where nothing was serious. Only now, looking back with the benefits of hindsight, does it become clear that those wild oats were in fact the seeds from which tragedy would ,row. Other friends from the same period have subsequently died of alcoholism, their lives utterly shattered and ruined by a taste formed in the same lighthearted way. Get- ting drunk was also just a joke, like hanging Whips on the wall. It was my fate recently to identify the body of one of them who had killed himself with an overdose, because of drink and money troubles. Looking down bark him laid out in the morgue brought figure memories of putting the same inert ligure to bed in the good old days, after scone dining club debauch, when his plight reduced one to laughter instead of tears. Carefree youth, indeed. Is there any more lethal illusion? Never is the heart of darkness nearer than when it seems most distant. Oh, the horror of it!
For far too long it has been intel- lectually fashionable to blame the cnglish gentleman for this country's economic decline. The suggestion is that the
om
uglish gentleman looked down on busi- ness and commerce, thereby discouraging the pursuit of these wealth-creating ac- tivities. As a result, Britain in the 19th cen- tury began to fall behind Germany, where the bourgeois virtues were more admired. This thesis was powerfully propounded in the 1960s by the historian Correlli Barnett in a famous work, The Decline of British Power, which far too many history school masters have used as their bible ever since. (Whenever John Rae, headmaster of West- minster, gives voice — which is all the time — it is invariably a somewhat soggy rehash of Correlli Barnett.) Not until Britain gets rid of all traces of the gentlemanly ideal will she be able to rise to the challenge of the technological age — that has been the message pumped out in the public prints, not least in the leader columns of The Times. (Presumably Rupert Murdoch may now be giving some of them second thoughts.) At long last, however, this con- ventional wisdom has been formidably challenged by a new work, published last week, which deserves the widest possible at- tention. Its modest title is The Gentlemen in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct (Macmillan, £15.00), by Shirley Robin Let- win, an American academic who has lived in London for many years. Although at one level this is a brilliant piece of Trollopian literary criticism it amounts, in effect, to a marvellously eloquent defence of gentle- manly ideals which are shown to be very far from anachronistic. According to Dr Let- win, Britain's decline may have been caused more by their abandonment than by their continuing ascendancy. What the country needs is not less gentlemen but more. The notion that their morality has no relevance to modern needs is shown to be very wide of the mark. Properly understood, it is as ap- plicable to running an industry as to runn- ing a landed estate; to running an off-shore island as to running a great empire. In other words, the price of national recovery does not have to be ruled by ruthless colonial ruffians, since gentlemen would be quite capable of doing the job by themselves, if only they were true once again to their own traditions. No, this is not a book about class; it is a book about morality, con- duct, character, manners; about, in short, living together satisfactorily in a civil association.
Where 'else can the British look for guidance in these matters except to gentlemanly ideals which, far more than Christianity, have shaped their way of life, determined their sense of right and wrong. That is why their modern debunking, and the suggestion that they are somehow inef- ficient or archaic, or merely snobbish, have proved so disastrous, since the critics have been able to find no other ideals to take their place. Having just spent a few weeks in Japan,, I am acutely conscious of the ad- vantages that country enjoys by having preserved an ancient tradition of gentlemanly civility governing all social and economic relationships; an ancient tradi- tion carried over from the pre-industrial past into the post-industrial present and as fruitful now as then. Although techniques have changed out of all recognition in Japan, the old values governing conduct, manners and the rest have remained very much the same,- without in any way impair- ing efficiency. Quite the reverse, efficiency there is promoted by the ease which comes from maintaining old moral grooves ,which are now polished so smooth that everything flows without friction. Nor has this reten- tion of ancient traditions of civility in any way prevented great progress towards social and economic equality. Decorous rules governing individual conduct become more important, rather than less, in a society try- ing to get rid of class distinctions. How crazy to suppose that an egalitarian society can function satisfactorily without clear codes of personal behaviour. Far from democratisation reducing the relevance of gentlemanly ideals, it should have the effect of requiring them to be inculcated far more rigorously. As for socialism, no system of government imaginable is more in need of gentlemanly values; more in need, that is, of civility and manners, good breeding and politeness, courtesy and honour, the con- spicuous lack of which has done far more to discredit the Labour Party than any amount of militant tendencies. If those are what are taught in schools, then the last thing any socialist should seek to do is to destroy those institutions. Dr Letwin's study of Trollope's gentlemen is very much a tract for our times; very much, too, a tract for The Times, since the great novelist would undoubtedly have relished the defeat of Whizzkid Harry Evans by a Douglas- Home.
T am told that Mrs Thatcher may raise a glass to the memory of Garibaldi on the occasion of an informal visit to London by the Italian Prime Minister which it is hoped will take place late next month. Professor Spadolini is a distinguished historian of the Risorgimento and his visit will form part of the celebrations being planned for the centenary of the great general's death. However when Garibaldi himself came to London in 1864, Disraeli thought it inap- propriate that the upholder of the conser- vative social order should drink to the health of such a firebrand. Queen Victoria, too, refused to meet him, called him a `revolutionist leader' and misspelt his name Garribaldi. On the other hand, Lord Derby, the Prince of Wales and the popula- tion at large were fascinated to catch a glimpse of the Hero, who on one occasion packed the Crystal Palace. Another event of the centenary which I greatly look for- ward to is the publication in June of a most engaging work by Oliver Knox — not all my Cambridge friends have come to a sticky end — whose walk in the footsteps of Garibaldi's extraordinary retreat from Rome to San Marino I joined for a few tumultuous days last year. No shortage of toasts, I am glad to say, offered to us by the hospitable citizens of Orvieto, Todi, Arez- zo, Montepulciano
Peregrine Worsthorne
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