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THE ENGLISH GENTLEMAN by Simon Raven. (Blond.)

JOHN BULL’S SCHOOLDAYS. Edited by Brian Inglis.(Hutchinson.)

A few weeks ago I read a letter in the New Statesman in which the following passage appeared. (It was written. I think, by a nuclear disarmer, though he did not make it very clear.)

I suggest we are in the hands of men beyond intelligence, reason and sanity. Surely, for a man to give over his life to the headless discipline of Service life is scarcely intelligent. A man who allows himself to be trained to suppress, extinguish or wipe out any resistance to his own particular brand of patriotism is hardly reasonable. And the man who dedicates one half of his life to his wife and family, while the other half presupposes he will make them widow and orphans at the first opportunity is hardly sane.

     I suppose it was this sort of attitude which provoked Simon Raven to write his amusing book in defence of The English Gentleman. For when the abuse is subtracted, this letter almost exactly describes what generations of Englishmen regarded, with genuine approval, as the proper duty of an officer and a gentleman. Voluntarily to accept the discipline of Service life, to train himself to fight for his country, to put his duty to his country before his obligations to his family, and finally, if need be, to give his life — what more could a man do?

     Simon Raven, who is as intelligent as he is amusing, would admit, of course, that nuclear weapons have made this sort of thing a little vieux jeu. Indeed the whole thesis of his book is not only that the military functions of the gentleman are outmoded, but that the moral code by which he judged himself and others is also out of date. ‘The traditional gentleman, one, that is, whose life is founded in truth, honour and obligation, has been done down by certain hostile social pressures, envy and materialism being paramount among them. These pressures have compelled him either to abandon his standards of excellence, or, if he should retain them, to recognize that they are unwanted anachronisms, objects at best of mockery and at worst of hatred.’

     The English Gentleman, then, is a lament for a vanished class. In order to side-step the charge of romantic snobbery Simon Raven neatly disclaims the title of gentleman for himself, pointing out (with splendid lack of reticence) that one who has been expelled from Charterhouse ‘for the usual thing’, sent down from King’s College, Cambridge, for refusing to pay his bills, and encouraged to leave his regiment because of gambling debts, could hardly hope to qualify. To make doubly sure, he has also invented an Aunt Sally which he calls the upper class (as distinct from gentlemen) consisting of those very few, very rich men and women who appear in the gossip columns of the popular press. I find this disingenuous and — dare I say it? — dishonourable. I prefer Mr Raven when he has the courage of his convictions.

     Nearly everything Simon Raven says about the English Gentleman proper seems to me to be true, though historians may quibble about his description of the gentleman’s origins and others may find his model, Sir Matthew Tench, almost as boring as Mr Evelyn Waugh’s Crouchback. Where I quarrel with him is his apparent assumption that such qualities as honour, independence, a sense of obligation and loyalty are confined to that class. I should have thought, for instance, that they could be found just as easily at the coal-face, let us say, of a Durham mine-field; and I cannot see that it is less self-sacrificing for a Scottish (or Australian) working man to volunteer to fight the Germans than for Sir Matthew Tench.

     The great fault of this well-written but rather muddled book is not that Simon Raven overrates the English Gentleman but that he underrates the English people. They are not nearly so despicable as he seems to imagine. Is it really true, for instance, that they distrust and resent personal excellence? (What about Bertrand Russell, Winston Churchill, Father Huddlestone, Aneurin Bevan?) Does the public really want ‘a chaste army’? (They are not chaste themselves.) Obviously there is a case to be made against democracy, but it’s no use trying to make it by attributing every possible fault to ‘the public’ or ‘the people’ without any attempt at proof or argument.

     It is true, of course, that only a minority of any class will naturally have the virtues and qualities Simon Raven praises. The rest will have to be taught. That is where the public school comes in. For if the public school had any purpose at all, it was a deliberate attempt to impress these virtues on an elite. This point — almost the whole point, I should have thought — seems to escape nearly all the contributors to John Bull’s Schooldays except Simon Raven himself. They complain, with amusing detail and often with admirable style, that they were unhappy at school, and Brian Inglis, the editor, points out that the more their parents paid for their education the more unhappy they seemed to be. But public schools, at least until the last war, were not trying to make boys happy: they were trying to make them honourable, independent, accustomed to endure pain and hardship without complaining, loyal to some larger unit — house, school, country — disciplined and capable of leadership. On the whole — pace Brian Inglis, who makes my own school, Shrewsbury, sound like Belsen — the best of them succeeded. Of course there was a price to be paid. Sensitive boys, like Brian Inglis and myself, were often miserable. Conformism and ‘the code’ suppressed some, though not all, individuality. The arts, though not learning, were neglected. It is easy enough to criticize the public schools as a system of education, but it is not much use writing about them unless you see what they were all about.

     Of the twenty-five contributors, only half of whom went to public schools themselves, Malcolm Muggeridge gets nearest the truth when he says that his own education, at a Borough Secondary School, ‘had the great advantage that it made practically no mark upon those subject to it. Scholastic and other deficiencies were more than compensated for by the fact that one’s first vivid impressions of life were provided, not by a closed and essentially homosexual community of schoolboys under the direction of masters who had themselves been through the same process, but by men and women actually living and earning their living. How much I preferred the ribald, noisy, dangerous world to any walled garden, however elegantly arranged and full of summer fragrance! No one ever seems to forget Eton. I easily forgot my Borough Secondary School.’

     I accept this as true, and think — like Simon Raven, Malcolm Muggeridge, most of the twenty-live other contributors and the Labour Party — that public schools are now out of date in their present form. But we might still be able to learn something from the public schools about how to give as many boys and girls as possible a sense of honour, truth and obligation. It is at best arguable that what was good for the gentlemen of England, might be good for everyone else.