The Gentleman in Trollope: Individuality and Moral Conduct
Cranston, Maurice
to the Soviet Union to a Bar Mitzvah, a p r e f e r e n c e Mr. Shorris a b e t t e d . What is more, he tells of his experimentation with a Christmas tree in his home, this advocate of...
...Letwin, his integrity and his conduct or his "way of moving about in the world," and what is perhaps not less important, his way of perceiving the world and himself...
...Letwin has turned away from sources of this kind to study the concept of the gentleman in an author who makes it h~s business to describe in depth and detail a world where the gentleman lived--and lived moreover in company with people who were sometimes less than gentlemen, so that the differences between the one and the o t h e r could be perceived in detail...
...Sir George Sitwell once pointed out that the e a r l i e s t use of "gentleman" in England did not designate a member of a particular social class...
...It is not easily done...
...She rejects the whole Western traditional image of the human being as a compound of reason and passion, of a higher and lower self, the two parts each at odds with the other...
...At times one s u s p e c t s that the author wishes to contrast his authenticity with the phoniness of his adv e r s a r i e s . But how can one be authentic when one is so ludicrously inaccurate in describing the Judaism one supposedly is defending...
...He tells us a good deal about his family and he recounts trips he took to the Soviet Union and to Spain...
...These blunders are, sad to say, but a representative sample...
...Finally, if one remains determined to show mercy one must insist that when all is said and done ignorance of the law--and the Law--does constitute a kind of excuse...
...Alexander Haig, Tom Wolfe, James Jackson Kilpatrick, George Gilder, Jack Paar, Donald H. Rumsfeld, George Will, J. Peter Grace, Maj...
...For example, it will not do to insist that powerlessness is the essence of the Jewish fate...
...Paul Laxalt, Joseph A. Califano, Garry Trudeau, David E. Davis, P.J...
...and, as Dr...
...The most likely answer might be "manners...
...Here we find Trollope anticipating, without formulating, a conception of politics close to that of Professor Michael Oakeshort, where politics is seen as an activity without any goal beyond that of keeping things quiet and orderly so as to enablc everyone to gQ...
...Some authors define a gentleman in terms of "simplicity," others in terms o f " p o l i s h and c u l t u r e " ; some point to his truthfulness, others his tact...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR, P.O...
...His swinish character assassinations of good men and women may then be forgiven because the author does not know what he is doing...
...Prange began his work immediately after the war as an official historian in Japan...
...but alternative definitions provided by the same dictionaries conflict with this, by stipulating that a gentleman is made by his conduct as distinct from a nobleman who is made by his blood...
...A man who locates Social Darwinism in the e i g h t e e n t h century usually must be taken to signal that he does not wish to be taken seriously...
...Letwin notes that Trollope ignores it, placing some of his gentlemen in the highest ranks of the aristocracy and others in the more obscure reaches of the middle classes...
...He sketches (but should have devoted more attention to) the strategic argument for the attack, and describes in detail the conduct and consequences of it...
...What is so splendid about her, Dr...
...He does not appear to know that Smith wrote on moral sentiments as well as economics...
...and this has been the line favored by most compilers of dictionaries: "Gentleman" is defined, for example, in the latest Oxf'rd English Dictionary as " a man of gentle birth . . . though not ranking among the n o b i l i t y . " It sounds straightforward enough...
...Almost, but not quite, at least not by me...
...He is a pure example of someone for whom being a gentleman consists in conforming to a " c o d e , " and he is t h e r e f o r e not a gentleman, but a t.'ad...
...Shorris does not know his Hess from his Albo and when it comes to other things he fares somewhat worse...
...There is thus much to be learned from Trollope's so-called "political novels," which are not novels about parliamentary adventures, as are those, for example, of Disraeli, but novels about the experiences of gentlemen in politics...
...And in this essentially philosophical exercise she has achieved a marked success...
...Good history--and good military history as much as any other t y p e - - r e q u i r e s that the author be willing to raise large questions and argue them out...
...For him, as for many other.s, the effort to understand the debacle that began America's active role in World War lI became an obsession...
...True, the attack on Pearl Harbor mobilized American will in a peculiarly violent and concentrated way, but the United States had mobilized just as effectively in 1917 without the benefit of such a surprise attack...
...Shorris combines his poisonous remarks about .Jewish neoconservatives with many stories about his own life...
...Among his dramatis personae few come closer to his ideal of the English gentleman than one who is n e i t h e r English nor male, namely, the Viennese immigrant, Madame Goesler...
...He mistakenly equates Hasidim and East European Jews...
...When it comes to Jewish thought, Mr...
...Shorris explores - - n e v e r went beyond saying that power tends to corrupt...
...I~ Payment enclosed City [] Bill me later State Zip X2NM THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 55 lH}e regarded his behaviour as a set of s i g n a l s to e s t a b l i s h a c e r t a i n i d e n t i t y for h i m s e l f . The motive for his correctness was a desire to get from others the d e f e r e n c e normally g r a n t e d to a g e n t l e m a n . . . As he found it pleasant to move among gentlemen, he tried to do whatever would make him acceptable...
...Letwin puts it, "comes from the importance and not the amount of what is done by a government--more than any other activity, politics is essential to the security of private life...
...Hence political life as seen by Trollope is not what Bagehot, for example, spoke of when he described Parliament as a "machine" where conflicting interests intermeshed...
...Shorris may deserve a modicum of pity...
...Readers of an earlier book of hers, The Pursuit of Certainty, will recall the good opinion she there expressed of David Hume, and Hume's refusal to see man's moral experience as a conflict between reason and passion, in which virtue was supposed to depend on the triumph of man's own passion...
...some his industry, others his independence from labor...
...This massive tome is without doubt the most thorough study of Pearl Harbor ever produced by a single author...
...the others...
...Deference for families of distinguished ancestry "keeps people from forgetting that whatever virtues may be possessed by their contemp o r a r i e s . . , there are also distinctions of another kind...
...Shorris a b e t t e d . What is more, he tells of his experimentation with a Christmas tree in his home, this advocate of True .ludaism...
...the "gentleman" named in medieval literature, as she puts it, "might be of any rank going...
...Indeed, Mr...
...The aim, one supposes, is to give the reader a sense of immediacy, but the effect is to bewilder him with a hail of dates, personages, and facts...
...A great merit of the work is Prange's depiction of events on the Japanese side...
...about his business in his own way without fear of losing his life, liberty, or property...
...Letwin wishes to 34 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982 explore and explain: the gentleman...
...One hopes, indeed, that this book will be d i s m i s s e d . It merits g e n e r a l oblivion and the specific contempt of those who disagree honorably with the Jewish neoconservatives...
...He seems unable to tell the difference between Adam Smith and John Calvin...
...It is not surprising that the resulting book is excessively long and detailed...
...Then, again, leading writers on the subject say, on the one hand, that a gentleman can be recognized by his gentleness and mildness, and, on the other, that he can be recognized by his r e a d i n e s s to stand f a s t and to fight...
...Hayakawa, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Henry Kissinger, Clayton Fritchey, Milton Friedman, Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Midge Decter, James Q. Wilson, David Brinkley, Woody Allen, Joseph Coors, Irving Kristol, Henry Fairlie, Alan Abelson, Charlton Heston, Senator Jake Garn, Gertrude Himmelfarb, James Hitchcock, Gen...
...Unfortunately he is especially fond of repeating his errors, as when he confuses Jerry Falwell with Bailey Smith not once but three times...
...Letwin follows Hume at least in turning away from theory, with a sigh, to return to the world of experience even if it is only the world of experience the art of a novelist has made intelligible...
...I f the book does receive its just deserts, Mr...
...Letwin: Is not moral philosophy concerned with the search for the universal, and is not the gentleman as we meet him in Trollope's novels a creature limited by time and space, a player in the drama of Victorian England on which the curtain has fallen...
...Critics have for generations been complaining about the habit philosophers have of illustrating ethics with problems of moral choice constructed in abstracto...
...H e r e d i t y , then, matters to the gentleman, but it is no essential part of him as is, according to Trollope, and to Dr...
...Their expansion in Southeast Asia (aimed at securing Indonesian oil, Malayan rubber, cutting the overland routes to China, and establishing the East Asian co-prosperity sphere) would have necessitated an attack on the 36 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1982...
...Tocqueville and other continental visitors to England were struck by the ease with which a man could move from one class to another in that kingdom...
...But what, if not class, does distinguish a gentleman from other men...
...Her moral quality depends entirely on her motives in that her conduct was governed by an unfailingly meticulous respect for the personality of herself and others, and on her remarkable ability to distinguish fine shades in the interpretation and responses available to her, which enabled her never to betray that respect...
...If that is so, then one must go further and say that Mr...
...The grandeur of politics," as Dr...
...it did so "because it had nothing to do with 'class' as defined by birth, occupation, wealth or rank...
...they are out to win by conducting themselves in accordance with certain r u l e s . " The great difference between politics and an actual game is that politics is concerned with the real world, and the settling of questions that are of paramount concern to everyone...
...some explain the gentleman as a unique creation of English civilization, others as something the English drew from European culture, taking more than they gave...
...and the modern gentleman whose character she analyzes cannot, she insists, be correctly understood in terms of blood or class...
...Cardinal Newman described a gentleman as one who " c a r e f u l l y avoids whatever may cause a jar, or jolt, in the minds of those with whom he is c a s t . . , his great concern being to make anyone at their ease and at home...
...Eliot A. Cohen is a teaching fellow in the Department of Government of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University...
...The most curious thing about them is that their heavy nostalgia makes it sound as though the author grew up at the turn of the century...
...h e r e f i n e m e n t of his manners and tastes, like his observation of promises, was a performance by an actor who knows what lines he has to speak in order to stay in the show...
...He patiently pieces together the story of the planning and training that went into the attack on Pearl Harbor...
...Earl Shorris was born in 1936...
...Captain Aylmer, for example, in The Belton Estate appears as "everyone's idea of a gentleman": He is a cultivated Member of Parliament who shines in the drawingroom, is considerate of others, and scrupulous in the keeping of promises...
...It is an essay in moral philosophy which uses the novels of Trollope to illustrate its argument, which is, broadly s p e a k i n g , that morality is not a set of a b s t r a c t p r i n c i p l e s but r a t h e r a concrete way of life...
...some his coolness,others his warmth...
...Nor can she be satisfied with Hume's cheerful skepticism or his bland reliance on habit and custom...
...an he be forgiven for that...
...THE GENTLEMAN IN TROLLOPE: INDIVIDUALITY AND MORAL CONDUCT Shirley Robin Letwin / Harvard University Press / $20.00 Maurice Cranston Another book about Trollope...
...Shorris is serious, all too serious...
...Letwin contrasts Madame Goesler with another of Trollope's women, Lizzie Eustace...
...He can be wry, but he hardly ever ascends to wit and he always displays a very profound humorlessness...
...In her, '_'Trollope drew the perfect antipode of a gentleman--someone who is almost wholly devoid of integrity...
...It is one of the ways of marking paths through the wilderness of mortal life...
...AT DAWN WE SLEPT: THE UNTOLD STORY OF PEARL HARBOR Gordon W. Prange / McGraw-Hill / $22.95 INFAMY: PEARL HARBOR AND ITS AFTERMATH John Toland / Doubleday / $17.95 THE AMERICAN MAGIC: CIPHERS, CODES AND THE DEFEAT OF JAPAN Ronald Lewin / Farrar, Straus and Giroux / $14.95 Eliot A. Cohen Gordon Prange devoted his life to the study of Pearl Harbor...
...Steve Tesich, Screenwriter ALSO: Ronald Reagan, Malcolm Muggeridge, Ben Wattenberg, Peregrine Worsthorne, S.I...
...Wedemeyer, James L. Buckley, Elliott Abrams, Lewis Lehrman, William Randolph Hearst, Jr., Shmuel Moyal, Huntington Cairns, Eric Hoffer, Anne Armstrong, Norman Podhoretz, Jeff MacNelly, Doris Grumbach, Ernest van den Haag, Paul McCracken, Brock Yates, Ray Price, James Wechsler, James Glassman, John Roche, John Chamberlain, William Safire, Neal Kozodoy, Henry Salvatori, David Meiselman, Martin Peretz, Charles Hornet, Edward Banfietd, Victor Lasky, Raymond Aron, Roy Cohnl Joseph Hazan, Eugene V. Rostow, Michael Novak, Richard Perle, Hugh Kenner, Frank Shakespeare, William Proxmire, Patrick Cosgrave, Jean-Francois Revel, Luigi Barzini, Tom Charles Huston, Clay La Force, Fred Silverman, John Lofton, Larry Flynt, M. Stanton Evans, Dana Andrews, Richard Whalen, Richard Lugar, Henry Regnery, Charles Peters, John Lukacs, Leonard Garment, Michael Kinsley, Tom Winter, Nathan Glazer, Alan Reynolds, Antonio Martino, Colin Welch, Robert Bleiberg, Herb Stein, Roger Starr, Walter Goodman, Harry Jaffa, Jeffrey Hart, David Packard, Robert Nisbet, James R. Schlesinger, Thomas Murphy, Suzanne Garment, Rocler Rosenblatt, Anthony Harrigan, Robert L. Bartley, David Stockman, Richard Allen, Ernest Lefever, Sen...
...I f such ignorance cannot excuse everything it might at least suffice simply to dismiss this book, which, contrary to the author's intention, is a thoughtless tirade rather than a lament, though it is surely lamentable...
...Mercy may dictate that one cease to think of this book as an argument a l t o g e t h e r and to r e g a r d it as the work of a poet...
...Inevitably the question will be asked of Dr...
...It was an operation so difficult and daring that most of the Japanese high command, including the task-force commander, Admiral Nagumo, opposed it...
...Given all this confusion to be found in definitions of the gentleman, it is understandable that Dr...
...Hammett, Adin K. Woodward, Robert Lekachman, Leo Rosten, Arthur Laffer, Jerome F. Donovan, and many others...
...As Prange suggests, war between the United States and Japan was a question of time--the American oil embargo, our support of China with materiel and men, and our opposition to Japanese expansion in Southeast Asia saw to that...
...I have said that Dr...
...Trollope's ladies and gentlemen talk a great deal about ancestry, but "as the stories unfold they seem to show that 'blood' does not count...
...He does not understand that Lord Acton--very much akin, by the way, to the thinkers Mr...
...I t is a good deal easier to recognize a gentleman than to say what makes him what he is or to define the word "gentleman...
...and it has dominated Western moral philosophy as much in its secular rationalistic as in its Christian phases...
...O'Rourke, William M.H...
...Politics, as an activity pursued by gentlemen, is a clean game, precisely because the players are gentlemen...
...Letwin quote.s a Victorian author's assertion that "we all know a man wbose manners leave very much to desire, and yet to whom it would be impossible to refuse the title of gentle,nan...
...George S. Patton, III, Fred Ikl~, Philip Crane, George W. Ball, Tom Stoppard, William F. Buckley, Jr., Patrick Buchanan, Albert Shanker, Lewis Lapham, Rowland Evans, Robert Novak, Jude Wanniski, Jack Kemp, William Rusher, Richard M. Nixon, William E. Simon, Malcolm S. Forbes, Jr., Thomas J. Lescher, Norman Mailer, Clare Boothe Luce, Gerald R. Ford, Melvin Lasky, Nelson Polsby, Roger Milliken, Randolph Richardson, Thomas Sowell, Sidney Hook, Jim Fallows, Edith Efron, Gen...
...When one considers all the many errors contained in this book one may be tempted to excuse its author on the ground that he must be kidding...
...But the p a r t i c i p a n t s . . , are not bent on achieving victory by any stratagems at hand...
...If integrity thus seems essential to the c h a r a c t e r of a gentleman as depicted by Trollope, that author is careful not to put too much trust in manners...
...Box 1969, Bloomington, Indiana 47402 Please enter a Please Print [] new Name [] renewal subscription to The American Spectator for one Address year (12 issues) for only $18...
...Like too many popular, narrative military histories (including the following one by John Toland) it buries interesting historical debates in a heap of anecdotes and contrived descriptions...
...Trollope, for a start, never understood the gentlemaL1 in terms of birth and blood...
...Indeed, as Dr...
...it is not, in one s e n s e , a book about Trollope at all...
...she has too scrupulou~ an espm't de systeme--and too little sympathy for what has become customary in the twentieth century for her to adopt or to feel safe in recommending such a posture...
...and Dr...
...On the o t h e r hand, Hazlitt claimed that a person could have the character of a gentleman without having good manhers, and Dr...
...The reminiscences can be informative but are almost always overly sentimental...
...The Japanese would have had to attack American bases no matter what...
...Letwin writes about Trollope because his novels depict in detail the thoughts and words and actions of a certain type of person whose character Dr...
...Letwin's book is not a work of literary criticism, but of moral philosophy...
...He sifted the official documents (of which there are literally tons) and interviewed hundreds of Japanese and American military men and civilians...
...What Trollope does seem to communicate is a respect for social distinction without reverence for "blood...
...Shirley Letwin's The Gentleman in Trollope is, however, a book altogether unlike Maurice Cranston is Professor o f Political Science at the London School of Economics...
...In truth, he is a cad...
...It would be hard to think of any other recent contribution to moral speculation bolder and more unexpected, more distinctive and compelling than hers...
...Letwin herself points out, it has "shaped our civilisation...
...But Mr...
...the air he describes seems heavy with odors of Chicken fat and pickle-brine...
...Whereas most lexicographers dwell on the distinction between a gentleman and a nobleman, Dr...
...There have been at least ten good ones in the past ten years: Trollope himself, by producing no less than 47 novels in 35 years in the spare time of a civil service job, seems to have inspired a corresponding zeal for industry in his admirers...
...Johnson, t h a t prince of lexicographers, rejected as "whimsical" any derivation of the word other than that of a "man of ancestry...
...It is an image of man which dates back at least as far as Plato...
...some his elegance of dress, others his i n d i f f e r e n c e to appearance...
...And when one considers the author as a prose stylist one can best leave it at saying that he writes badly, if only because he writes with inadvertent repetitiveness...
...What he is doing, of course, is to pollute the atmosphere of public discourse by making it safe for unwarranted attacks on Jews...
...Shorris so prodigiously displays his ignorance that he is entitled to much excusing...
...Letwin squarely rejects this bifurcation of the human person, and she therefore has to develop her moral theory in language which does not assume the reality of what she calls the "self-divided man...
...Nonetheless, if one is willing to skim, the book is worth the effort...
...Let-win suggests it is just because of this social fluidity that the title of gentleman flourished in England more than elsewhere...
...Trollope depicts parliamentary life as a sort of game: "There are adversaries, prizes to be won and defeats to be endured, and everyone takes sides...
...She evidently agrees...
...It is not literary criticism or commentary or biography...
...Letwin herself takes care to remind us, however, she has not written this book to recommend the gentleman as a uniquely admirable archetype but to give us fresh thought about what morality might be...
...Lerwin explains it, this is because: Who reads The American Spectator...
...As Dr...
...The Lord promised Jews that thcy would be a mighty nation and it is safer to view their history as a mysterious experience decreed by a mysterious God...
...Whether, as most historians claim (and Americans like to think), it was an act of madness is quite another matter...
...Letwin suggests, is her integrity: Judged by the consequences of her conduct there is nothing grand or even especially admirable about her...
...At Dawn We Slept, prepared by two of Prange's students, is an edited version of Prange's 3,500-page manuscript...
...Let'win (tactfully avoiding the question of whether that heartless baronet Sitwell could himself be considered a gentleman) agrees...
...She certainly cannot adopt Hume's alternative to the conception of passion at war with reason, namely, a conception of calm passions prevailing over violent passions to secure the triumph of good over evil, for that leaves the bifurcation of man intact...
...In her present book, she goes even further than Hume in the same direction...
...And for those who are not strong or perceptive enough to rely on their own judgement, a social hierarchy provides a rough guide to whom they will find compatible...
...Dr...
Vol. 15 • August 1982 • No. 8
