THE HERO AS GENTLEMAN
571
They offered us a dream world which had sufficient connection
with reality to be, in a boy's eyes, convincing. It has the attractive vul–
garity of the end of an aristocratic tradition adapted to upper-middle–
class needs. The Hero is, to begin with, a man of means. Usually, the
source of his income is not mentioned. He is rich because it is natural
for the gentleman to be so. He also leads a natural life between his
country estate or estates and his house and clubs in town. In some few
cases, he earns his money in business or at the bar, but the process of
earning does not enter into the story. Buchan's main hero, Hannay, had
'made his pile' in South Africa before any of his adventures happened
to
him.
The barristers or businessmen we see only in their clubs, at
week ends, or on holiday, when they cease to be workers and become
town-and-country gentlemen. They then lead the good life, which con–
sists of comfort, food and pleasant exercise. Food, especially; Fortnum
and Mason's is a name to conjure with; in some of these books it has
the magic resonance that Proust ascribes to Guermantes and Parma. I
remember reading Buchan during the General Strike as a hungry man
dreams of beefsteaks. He provided a sort of dramatization of the adver–
tisements in
Punch.
That is probably one of the least vicious aspects of
this phony writing. The material enjoyment of life is an
art,
and a pre–
occupation with good food and drink is a basic virtue to be found in
Buchan, Wodehouse, Mitford and Waugh. One should either have
luscious plenty, such as they assume to be right, or pure and conscious
asceticism. The artistic opposite of a rich meal is black bread and pulses,
not bad food, the swallowing of which is humiliating and demoralizing.
Similarly, the opposite of 'gracious living' is clean-swept poverty, so that
Buchan's characters can move easily between a country house and a
shepherd's cottage, but do not go to "obscure addresses in Maida Vale,"
except, of course, when chasing wickedness. Having lived at such ad–
dresses myself for years, without the consolations of wickedness, I can
see the point. Feudalism, even in its very last semi-middle-class form,
provided a coherent relationship between greatness and simplicity, be–
tween decoration and nudity. Vulgarity only crept in when recipes were
quoted, vintages mentioned and the lay-out of the morning room too
lovingly described. One had, of course, to overlook the all-pervading vul–
garity of the silence about money-earning in a society which had come
to be based almost entirely on money. But that was exactly the sort of
thing that young readers, without being vulgar themselves, would na–
turally overlook.
The Buchan/Yates/Sapper gentleman, fortified with excellent food
and drink, pink through regular exercise and shining from his daily
bath, had many good qualities. He retained, in particular, the aristocratic
