When Knighthood Was in Flower

...Reviewed by William C. Watterson Assistant Professor of English, Bowdoin College The myth of lapsed gentility, at least as old as Chaucer, has always been one of England's most revered literary traditions, but in the age of Victoria it animated every dimension of middle-and upper-class life...

...Displaying the same wit and exemplary learning that marked his Life in the English Country House and The Victorian Country House, he amply examines castellation (the Victorian coinage referring to the addition of moats, battlements, towers and other Gothic adornments to modern structures...

...Tennyson managed to win for Birmingham its first seat in Parliament, and in 1826 he sponsored a successful bill outlawing man traps and spring guns-poachers could no longer be snared like the animals they sought to steal...

...seizing every piece of fruitful waste ground she can set her foot on, and there teaching her colonists that their chief virtue is to be fidelity to their country, and that their first aim is to be to advance the power of England by land and sea...

...No event reveals the spirit of the period better than the Eglinton Tournament of 1838...

...Only the 18th century, with its distrust of ritual and its rationalism, deism and egalitarianism, disdained Arthurian romance...

...Young 19th century Tories weaned on Digby and Sir Thomas Malory developed a number of affectations, including the changing of family names to Norman antecedents (Charles Tennyson, the poet's uncle, became Tenn-son d'Eyncourt) and the collecting of old armor, often at exorbitant prices...

...It is nice to see the pictures here by Sir Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris, George Watts and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, but some of the lesser ones are boring in their thematic redundancy...

...And Girouard's insistence that the Victorians were unique in their regard for Camelot needs to be qualified...

...Many ended their days with openly conservative sympathies as neochivalric politics slowly turned atavistic...

...At this heavily attended fiasco, 55 peers and peeresses as well as numerous baronets, knights and gentlemen arrived in Scotland to participate in a pageant that was to be followed by jousting and various medieval entertainments...

...The renascent spirit of chivalry did not confine itself to estheticism, and Girouard indicates some of the political consequences of the new noblesse oblige...

...More was involved than the sentimental invoking of Arthur's court, as Mark Girouard makes clear in his engaging study: The revival of chivalry coincided with the triumphs of the emerging empire...

...Manners fought the mill owners' exploitation of their workers, helped establish public parks and bathhouses for the poor, and urged a more humane policy in Ireland...

...Similarly, Girouard's claims notwithstanding, John Ruskin's calling for the youth of England "to make their country again a royal throne of kings...

...This beautifully designed volume delves into other aspects of the period's fine arts, too...

...His The Broad Stone of Honour, constantly expanded from 1822-'77, was the best-selling handbook of deliberately old-fashioned values...

...One can easily doubt, for instance, that what Carlyle called "muscular Christianity" really fits the term...

...When Prince Albert died, the Queen consistently chose memorials that depicted him in the garb of a fallen medieval hero...

...The end Ruskin adumbrates is closer to fascist imperialism than Camelot...

...That this list sounds a little like the Boy Scout oath is not surprising-we learn from Girouard that Lord Baden-Powell, the founder of the scouting movement, was himself an ardent proponent of Digby's popular tenets...

...The Ciceronian concept of rational comradeship was easily applied to females-except when it resulted in the clubman's overt misogyny-and this harmonized with the Christian stress on sexual repression...

...The book contains 31 lavish color plates, plus 170 in black and white, no doubt accounting for its price...

...A delightful illustration of a suit of armor's torso demonstrates the late Georgian marriage of romantic nostalgia to practicality: The contraption is a woodstove for warming the hall of a great house...

...In matters sexual, Girouard tells us, there was a general derogation of erotic relations with women that can partly be traced to the single sex public schools, where Cicero's De Amecitia was flogged into pupils...

...A mild obsession with purity (not the same thing as virginity, according to the author) set the tone for heterosexual relationsips...

...He shows, for example, how widely the Scottish Baronial style-inspired by Scott's experiments at Abbotsford??had caught on in England, citing Matthew Russell's transformation of Brancepeth Castle and Charles Tennyson's extensive remodeling of Bayons, his Regency house...

...It was the eccentric and incurably romantic Kenelm Digby who articulated the Victorian version of the knightly moral code...

...Ultimately, though, the repeal of the corn laws left the young upper-class activists without a unifying cause, and they never recovered their earlier solidarity...

...They also decorated their houses in Gothic styles, and on this architectural nostalgia Girouard's book is particularly rich in information...

...Fumbling bachelors, meanwhile, took Sir Galahad for their paragon, preferring to idolize women rather than touch them-there were too many books to be read, too many good works to be done...

...Territorial expansion, with its missionary zeal, may have cloaked itself in Christianity and the white man's burden, but the economic benefits of colonies for a highly industrialized nation were at the heart of the matter...

...Although it is dangerous to patly explain sexuality with notions drawn from the history of ideas, it seems safe to say that the mystique of delayed gratification espoused by the Knights of the Round Table further contributed to their Victorian imitators' lack of ardor...

...Another failing is Girouard's tendency to classify the most tangential phenomena under the heading of chivalry...

...Still, Mark Girouard tells us much that is fascinating about the highly self-conscious Victorians and their romantic efforts to restore a knightly Britain...

...A chapter on the connections between the crafts movements and neomedievalism's anachronistic class-consciousness would have strengthened the book...

...a sceptered isle, for all the world a source of light" is only superficially chivalric...

...The group known as Young England-Whigs with radical leanings like Charles Tennyson, John Manners, Lord Henry Brougham, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton-attacked landowners for their collusion with industrial arrivistes...

...Such jeers at Tory pomposity did not bring an end to the antiquarianism, however...

...He emphasized heroism in striving after virtue, trust in God, generosity, high honor, independence, truthfulness, loyalty, hardihood, contempt of luxury, courtesy, modesty, and respect for women...

...Protecting the people did not entail offering them shelter from the marauding barons of yore...

...Indeed, for the most part The Return to Camelot is a model work of art history cum sociology...

...Since he did not believe that noble birth was necessary or sufficient for reaching his brand of excellence, Digby found an avid readership among the middle class...

...If on th whole The Return to Came-lot is an evocative portrayal of the Victorian era, it nevertheless does have some faults...

...instead, crusades for better legislation were launched on the paper battlefields of Parliament...

...More revealing is Ruskin's urging that England needs "to found colonies as fast and as far as she is able, formed of her most energetic and worthiest men...

...A violent rainstorm washed them out in their fantastic courtly array, and for years afterward an unsympathetic press ridiculed the memory of armored Etonians rusting under umbrellas, their damsels in sartorial distress...