THE HERO AS GENTLEMAN
Here is a critical work with a difference.*
It
is an intelligent
analysis of the novels of Dornford Yates, Buchan and Sapper carried out
by a man who, as an uncritical boy, adored these three writers. He still
has a warm spot in his heart for them, and his tone remains affectionate
even when he is pointing out their worst deficiencies. Moreover he is
so steeped in their prose that he discusses them in their own style. It
is rather as if Bertie Wooster, having at last reached years of discretion
but still speaking the same kind of English, were to lecture on the short–
comings of P. G. Wodehouse's art. We hear the upper-class voice assur–
ing
us~uite
rightly-that it is almost all a jolly bad show. The effect
of this voice is curious. It reminds one of some poem by Betjeman in
loving dispraise of a Victorian monument, which is part of us although
we are ashamed of it. Very likely the precise quality of this cracked note
will be inaudible to later generations, but, in the meantime, it provides
an hour or two of rueful fun for those of us who were boys between
the two wars. Perhaps it will even help us to accomplish that feat which,
the whole world says, is beyond the Englishman's ability, the feat of
growing up.
Mr. Usborne remarks in his Introduction that he has limited him–
self to Yates, Buchan and Sapper because he knows them so well, but
that he might, with equal justification, have extended his study to Steven–
son, Kipling, Conan Doyle, Anthony Hope, Ian Hay, Edgar Wallace
and Dorothy Sayers. I am not sure that he has got this list quite right.
His subject, as his title proclaims, is the Gentleman Hero in pseudo–
literature. This is the main theme in only one of the seven additional
authors he mentions, and two of them at least belong to real literature.
I would suggest as a more coherent list, Yates, Buchan, Sapper, Dor–
othy Sayers, Wodehouse, Evelyn Waugh and Nancy Mitford. It may
be objected that two of the authors in my list-Waugh and Miss Mit–
ford-belong to real literature. In spite of their great talents, I am not
sure that they do. They are much nearer to literature, of course, than
Miss Sayers or Sapper, but both have something of the fundamental non–
seriousness of the best-seller. I would say that the range of quality in
these seven authors is from rubbish to first-class near-literature, but that
their subject is the same, in spite of many surface differences; it is the
final incarnation of the English Gentleman. In Yates, Buchan, Sapper
*
Club land Heroes,
by Richard Usborne. Constable, 15s.
